Butterfly

U+1F98B

So Emojis Animals & Nature Animal-bug Spring

About Butterfly

Butterfly is the Unicode character 🦋 at codepoint U+1F98B in the Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs block of the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP).

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Reference

An animal outside the animal block. U+1F98B was added in Unicode 9.0 to Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs at U+1F900 to U+1F9FF, not to Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs where the snail, the wolf and the rest of the older animals live — that block was allocated in one pass for the carrier merge and had no room left. It has general category So, carries Emoji_Presentation so it renders in colour unaided, and carries no chart annotation or cross-reference at all. Unicode's test data files it under animal-bug, a subgroup of sixteen fully qualified emoji, which is also where the snail sits despite the two being encoded six years and three thousand codepoints apart.

Typical uses

Nature and seasonal contexts
Messaging where transformation or lightness is the idea
Design work, where its silhouette reads at small sizes

At a glance

U+1F98B, Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs; Unicode 9.0; general category So
Emoji version E3.0; Emoji_Presentation, so no U+FE0F is needed
Filed under animal-bug alongside the snail, from a different block
No annotation, no cross-reference, no zodiac note
No HTML named entity. Write 🦋 or 🦋

Historical Notes

Origins

The butterfly's symbolic freight is not something a code chart carries, and this entry says nothing at all beyond the name.

Unicode

Added in Unicode 9.0 and published as emoji version E3.0, in Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs. That block holds 256 assigned characters of which 242 carry an emoji property and 242 carry Emoji_Presentation — effectively all of it, unlike the older blocks, which mix text characters and emoji freely.

Where an emoji lives is an accident of date

The subgroup a character belongs to and the block it sits in answer different questions. Subgroups are CLDR's organisation of what emoji mean, and they cut across the encoding: animal-bug holds sixteen emoji drawn from at least two blocks. Blocks record when a character was allocated. Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs holds 768 assigned characters and filled up; Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs is where the additions from about 2016 went, which is why a butterfly shares an address with most of the newer hands rather than with the other insects. Nothing about the character explains its neighbourhood — only its date does.

Developer Notes

Unicode Codepoint
Decimal
UTF-8 (hex)
UTF-16 (hex)
HEX Entity
HTML Entity
CSS (\xxxx)
JavaScript
Python

How to Use Butterfly

To use the Butterfly 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: '\1F98B';. In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u{1F98B}' evaluates to 🦋. In Python source, write '\U0001F98B'.

The character encodes to F0 9F A6 8B as UTF-8 bytes and D83E DD8B as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 129419.

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

Do not infer a category from a codepoint range. This animal is nowhere near the animal block, and its neighbours are hands and hearts.
Outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, so a surrogate pair in UTF-16 and a naive character count of two.
Not Emoji_Modifier_Base and not a variation-sequence base.
Group emoji by CLDR subgroup rather than by block if the grouping is meant to be about meaning.
East Asian Width Wide; line break class ID.
No named HTML entity. Write 🦋 or 🦋.

In the Wild

An encyclopaedia article on butterflies contains no animal emoji at all. The article about the Unicode block this character lives in is thick with them — hundreds of pictographic characters, almost all of them chart cells, this one among them.

Those two pages side by side are the point: emoji cluster heavily in writing about emoji and are nearly absent from writing about what they depict. Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.

FAQ

Why is it not near the other animals?

Because the older block was full. Characters added from around 2016 went to Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs regardless of what they depict.

Is it grouped with the other insects?

Yes, by CLDR. It shares the animal-bug subgroup with the snail even though the two are in different blocks.