About Face With Tears Of Joy
Face With Tears Of Joy is the Unicode character 😂 at codepoint U+1F602 in the Emoticons block of the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP).
Reference
The most written-about character in its block. U+1F602 sits in Emoticons, dates from Unicode 6.0, has general category So and carries Emoji_Presentation. Emoticons is unlike the blocks around it: all eighty of its assigned characters are emoji and all eighty default to emoji presentation, so there is not a single text character in it. Unicode's chart gives this one no annotation at all, while CLDR's keyword list runs to fifteen entries and includes lmao, lol, rofl and roflmao beside crying, joy, laugh and tear. Its subgroup, face-smiling, holds fourteen fully qualified entries, every one of them a single codepoint.
Typical uses
- Marking something as funny, which is what most of its keywords describe
- Reaction messages, where it is the whole reply
- Not for crying in the sad sense — the tears here belong to laughter
At a glance
- U+1F602, Emoticons; Unicode 6.0; general category So
- Emoji version E0.6; Emoji_Presentation, so no U+FE0F is needed
- No chart annotation and no cross-reference
- Fifteen CLDR keywords, four of them internet abbreviations
- No HTML named entity. Write 😂 or 😂
Historical Notes
Origins
How this character rose, and then acquired a generational tell, is well documented outside the standard and not at all inside it.
Unicode
Added in Unicode 6.0, published in 2010, as emoji version E0.6. Its block, Emoticons, runs from U+1F600 to U+1F64F and is full: eighty assigned characters, eighty of them emoji, eighty with emoji presentation, no free positions. Eight of the eighty are skin-tone bases, and every one of those eight is named for a gesture or a person rather than for an expression.
A dictionary's word of the year
In 2015 Oxford Dictionaries chose this character as its word of the year. The standard's own files record none of that — no annotation on the character hints at it, and nothing in the encoding could. What Unicode gives is a codepoint in a block of eighty; what happened to it afterwards belongs entirely to usage.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Face With Tears Of Joy
To use the Face With Tears Of Joy 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: '\1F602';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u{1F602}' evaluates to 😂. In Python source, write '\U0001F602'.
The character encodes to F0 9F 98 82 as UTF-8 bytes and D83D DE02 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 128514.
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
- Its block contains no text characters at all, so nothing in Emoticons needs a variation selector to render as an emoji.
- Outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, so a surrogate pair D83D DE02 in UTF-16 and a naive character count of two.
- Not Emoji_Modifier_Base and not a variation-sequence base — the eight skin-tone bases in this block are all gesture or person characters.
- East Asian Width Wide; line break class ID.
- No named HTML entity. Write 😂 or 😂.
In the Wild
Its own encyclopaedia article uses the character twelve times: in the opening sentence, in the character-information box, in a headline quoted from a news outlet, and repeatedly inside the titles of cited articles. A separate article on words of the year uses it once, inside the 2015 row of a table — the character standing in for the word it was chosen instead of. A third, on a company that documents emoji, uses it three times while describing how its standing changed.
That is unusual. Reference writing generally reaches for emoji as chart cells and stops there; this one turns up inside sentences, doing the work the sentence is about.
Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
Is it laughing or crying?
Laughing. Its CLDR keywords are the laughter vocabulary — lmao, lol, rofl, roflmao, haha, hehe — and the tears belong to that.
Was it really a word of the year?
Yes. Oxford Dictionaries chose it in 2015.
Does it take a skin tone?
No. Its block has eight skin-tone bases and every one of them is a gesture or person character.
Is there an HTML entity?
No named one. Write 😂 or 😂.