TheSkull emoji (💀) is anemoji depicting ahuman skull. It was added toUnicode'sEmoticon block in October 2010. Originally representingdeath orgoth subculture, the emoji grew to represent a wide range of emotions by the early 2020s, including joy, laughter, and embarrassment. It is especially popular among members ofGeneration Z andGeneration Alpha.
An emoji depicting a skull was originally included in the proprietary emoji sets fromSoftBank Mobile andau by KDDI. Using these sets as a source,[1] theUnicode Consortium included the skull emoji in theirUnicode 6.0 standard, released in October 2010.[2] Prior to that, the skull emoji was available foriPhone users in Japan, initially using a specificPrivate Use Area for compatibility with SoftBank's set.[3] Following the discovery that installing Japaneseapps unlocked the emoji keyboard,Apple released emoji support worldwide in 2011.[4]
Throughout the 2010s, the skull emoji retained its original meaning, symbolizing death or goth subculture.[5][6] In 2016,Wired reported that people were more likely to use the skull emoji when they posted online about their phones being broken, signifying that they are "socially dead".[7] The emoji had limited popularity, ranking 92nd among the most used emojis onTwitter in 2015.[8] It reached the top 10 in the United States by 2019, but remained outside the top 50 in other countries.[9] In the early 2020s, the skull emoji was popularized byGeneration Z, the demographic cohort of people born between the mid-1990s and the early 2010s, who started using it as a replacement for the phrases "I'm dead" or "I'm dying" – short for "I'm dying of laughter" – to express joy or happiness,[10] as well as laughter.[11] They viewedFace with Tears of Joy emoji, the emoji previously used to convey these emotions, as "uncool",[12] due to its association with older generations.[11] Before this meaning of the skull emoji became popular, in 2015, the ghost emoji (👻) was used instead.[13] Over time, the skull emoji has evolved to represent a wide range of emotions,[14] including embarrassment.[15]
Adam Aleksic ofThe Washington Post viewed the skull emoji as a symbol that represents humor or irony and believed that it became apunctuation mark. Comparing the emoji to atone tag, he wrote: "Punctuating the text with a skull lightens the tone and signals humility".[16]
Kayleigh Dray ofStylist thought the popularization of the skull emoji was related tothe COVID-19 pandemic and the "dystopian pandemic nightmare" it resulted in. "[T]he laugh-cry emoji has died a sad little death and been replaced with an ever-so-appropriate skull", wrote the journalist.[17]
| Preview | 💀 | |
|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | SKULL | |
| Encodings | decimal | hex |
| Unicode | 128128 | U+1F480 |
| UTF-8 | 240 159 146 128 | F0 9F 92 80 |
| UTF-16 | 55357 56448 | D83D DC80 |
| GB 18030 | 148 57 214 50 | 94 39 D6 32 |
| Numeric character reference | 💀 | 💀 |
| Shift JIS (au by KDDI)[18] | 246 209 | F6 D1 |
| Shift JIS (SoftBank 3G)[18] | 247 92 | F7 5C |
| 7-bit JIS (au by KDDI)[1] | 118 83 | 76 53 |
| Emoji shortcode[19] | :skull: | |
| Google name (pre-Unicode)[20] | SKULL | |
| CLDR text-to-speech name[21] | skull | |
| Google substitute string[20] | [どくろ] | |
The dictionary definition of💀 at Wiktionary