About Briefcase
Briefcase is the Unicode character 💼 at codepoint U+1F4BC in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block of the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP).
Reference
An object that doubles as an occupation. U+1F4BC sits in Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs, dates from Unicode 6.0, has general category So and carries Emoji_Presentation. What makes it unusual among object characters is that it is a building block: it ends eighteen defined sequences, and every one of them is an office worker — three person characters, each with a plain form and five skin-tone forms, joined to this briefcase by a zero-width joiner. One of those three is U+1F469, which this site has its own page for as woman. CLDR gives the standalone character two keywords, briefcase and office, and Unicode's chart gives it no annotation at all.
Typical uses
- Work and employment contexts, which is what the office keyword records
- As the second half of an office-worker sequence, where it supplies the occupation
- Interface categories, where its lack of a chart annotation is an advantage
At a glance
- U+1F4BC, Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs; Unicode 6.0; general category So
- Emoji version E0.6; Emoji_Presentation, so no U+FE0F is needed
- Ends 18 defined ZWJ sequences, all of them office workers
- No chart annotation and no cross-reference; two CLDR keywords
- No HTML named entity. Write 💼 or 💼
Historical Notes
Origins
What a briefcase has to do with employment is not something the encoding says. What it does record is narrower and checkable: what the character combines with.
Unicode
Added in Unicode 6.0, published in 2010, as emoji version E0.6. The office-worker sequences are much newer than the character — they are built with the zero-width joiner mechanism, which turns a pair of existing characters into a single unit rather than requiring a new codepoint for every combination.
Eighteen sequences and not one new codepoint
The standard defines 2,901 emoji sequences in total, 1,614 of which contain a joiner. This character appears in eighteen of them and begins none: it is always the second element, the thing the person is doing. Three person bases times six forms each — plain plus the five skin tones — gives the eighteen exactly. That arithmetic is the whole argument for the joiner mechanism: eighteen occupations' worth of meaning out of four codepoints and no new assignments.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Briefcase
To use the Briefcase symbol (💼) in HTML, insert the
entity 💼 directly into your markup. The decimal entity 💼 works in any HTML-serialised document.
In CSS pseudo-elements use content: '\1F4BC';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u{1F4BC}' evaluates to 💼. In Python source, write '\U0001F4BC'.
The character encodes to F0 9F 92 BC as UTF-8 bytes and D83D DCBC as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 128188.
This is a fully-qualified emoji and should render with colour on iOS, Android, Windows and macOS. Appearance may vary between platforms, but the underlying codepoint is identical everywhere.
Things to know
- In an office-worker sequence the briefcase is the last element and carries no skin tone itself; the tone belongs to the person character in front of it.
- Splitting such a sequence on codepoint boundaries yields a person and a briefcase, which is a common way to break emoji text.
- Outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, so a surrogate pair D83D DCBC in UTF-16 and a naive character count of two.
- Not Emoji_Modifier_Base and not a variation-sequence base.
- East Asian Width Wide; line break class ID.
- No named HTML entity. Write 💼 or 💼.
In the Wild
In CLDR's two annotation files the character is the cp attribute defining the office-worker sequences rather than anyone using the character.
The exception is worth the space. A widely used list of programming resources writes a briefcase and then the word Jobs, as a section heading — the character doing exactly what the CLDR keyword office suggests, in a place a person chose to type it.
Pages change; this is what that one showed on the day.
FAQ
Why does this character appear inside other emoji?
Because office worker is built as a sequence: a person character, a zero-width joiner, then this briefcase. Eighteen such sequences are defined.
Does it take a skin tone?
No. In an office-worker sequence the tone attaches to the person character in front of it, not to the briefcase.
Is there a separate office emoji?
The keyword office is attached to this character; the sequences it forms are named office worker. There is no plain office character in the same subgroup.
Is there an HTML entity?
No named one. Write 💼 or 💼.