What 🤪 means
Deliberate, over-the-top silliness, usually aimed at yourself. One eye big, one small, tongue out: the sender is owning up to a daft plan, a chaotic day or plain hyperactive fun.
A 2016 Unicode proposal called the candidate “grinning face with crazy eyes.” Unicode is the shared character standard that lets phones and computers show the same emoji; that proposal picked new faces from popular stickers and usage rankings on messaging services.
When can 🤪 sound careless?
Right after bad news or an apology. Its playfulness can sound like you are laughing at the other person's trouble. When you mean support or accountability, say it plainly and leave the face out.
Casual, goofy and openly unserious; at home with friends, odd at work.
After bad news, it can look like mockery.
Don't confuse it with
1Combination ideas
2Worth knowing
- Early designs from Microsoft, WhatsApp and Google showed a toothy grin or a grimace that looked more menacing than silly. WhatsApp on Android switched to a tongue-out face in its 2.19.7 update, in 2019.
- “Zany” comes from zanni, the comic servant roles of Italian commedia dell'arte, an improvised masked comedy. English took the word, via French, for a clown's mimicking sidekick, then for anything wildly silly.
Questions people ask
2is 🤪 flirting?
Not by itself. It signals silliness; look to the surrounding words for any romantic interest.
does 🤪 mean crazy in a bad way?
No. It means silly-crazy, a playful mood, not a comment on anyone's mental health.
How to type 🤪
:zany_face:the common shortcode; support varies by platform.🤪Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.