Skin Tone Variants
The high-five reading is wrong, but it was never a stupid mistake. Apple's design carried a golden burst of light behind the hands for years, and that looks a great deal like the impact of two palms meeting; the interpretation surfaced on Twitter in 2012, went properly viral in 2013, and has never entirely died. The giveaway is in the artwork itself — both thumbs sit side by side, pressed together, which is not a position two hands can reach in a high five. Apple removed the light burst in 2015.
Its formal Unicode name preserves what it started as: PERSON WITH FOLDED HANDS. The earliest carrier versions, from SoftBank in 2000 and au by KDDI in 2003, drew a whole figure with head bowed and eyes closed rather than a floating pair of hands. The cropping came later, and took the context with it.
That original figure also explains how much ground it covers. In Japanese use it does the work of gassho and of the itadakimasu said before a meal — please, thank you, sorry, respect — while elsewhere it reads as Christian prayer, or namaste, or the Buddhist anjali mudra. It is one of the few emoji whose vagueness is genuinely useful, because it lands as sincere in most of those registers at once.
About Folded Hands
Folded Hands is the Unicode character 🙏 at codepoint U+1F64F in the Emoticons block of the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP).
Technical Reference
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Folded Hands
To use the Folded Hands 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: '\1F64F';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u{1F64F}' evaluates to 🙏. In Python source, write '\U0001F64F'.
The character encodes to F0 9F 99 8F as UTF-8 bytes and D83D DE4F as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 128591.
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.