Skull emoji

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Skull emoji as it appeared in Google's Noto Project

The skull emoji (U+1F480 💀 <reserved-1F480>) is an emoji depicting a human skull. It was added to Unicode's Emoticon block in October 2010. Originally representing death or goth 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 of Generation Z and Generation Alpha.

Development

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Further information: Emoji § History

An emoji depicting a skull was originally included in the proprietary emoji sets from SoftBank Mobile and au by KDDI. Using these sets as a source,[1] the Unicode Consortium included the skull emoji in their Unicode 6.0 standard, released in October 2010.[2] Prior to that, the skull emoji was available for iPhone users in Japan, initially using a specific Private Use Area for compatibility with SoftBank's set.[3] Following the discovery that installing Japanese apps unlocked the emoji keyboard, Apple released emoji support worldwide in 2011.[4]

Evolution of meaning and usage

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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 on Twitter 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 by Generation 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 viewed Face 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, U+1F47B 👻 <reserved-1F47B> was used instead.[13] Over time, the skull emoji has evolved to represent a wide range of emotions,[14] including embarrassment.[15]

Reception

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Adam Aleksic of The Washington Post viewed the skull emoji as a symbol that represents humor or irony and believed that it became a punctuation mark. Comparing the emoji to a tone tag, he wrote: "Punctuating the text with a skull lightens the tone and signals humility".[16]

Kayleigh Dray of Stylist thought the popularization of the skull emoji was related to the 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]

Encoding

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Character information
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 &#128128; &#x1F480;
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]

See also

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References

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  18. ^ a b Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration at line 2172: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value).
  19. ^ Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration at line 2172: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value).
  20. ^ a b Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration at line 2172: attempt to index field '?' (a nil value).
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  • The dictionary definition of 💀 at Wiktionary
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