About Headphone
Headphone is the Unicode character 🎧 at codepoint U+1F3A7 in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block of the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP).
Reference
A pictograph with a text form almost nobody uses. U+1F3A7 sits in Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs, dates from Unicode 6.0, has general category So and carries Emoji_Presentation, so it arrives in colour by default. It is one of 371 characters in the standard for which variation sequences are defined, which means U+FE0E after it formally requests a monochrome text form and U+FE0F requests the colour one. Of those 371 bases, 219 default to text and 152 — this one among them — default to emoji. Its chart entry carries one formal alias, music. Unicode's test data files it with the music objects, nine fully qualified entries covering the microphone, the radio and the notes.
Typical uses
- Listening contexts of any kind, which the alias music covers
- Audio and podcast sections in documents and interfaces
- Not for earbuds specifically — the standard encodes no separate character for those
At a glance
- U+1F3A7, Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs; Unicode 6.0; general category So
- Emoji version E0.6; Emoji_Presentation, so no U+FE0F is needed
- A variation-sequence base: U+FE0E requests a text form, U+FE0F the emoji one
- Formal alias in the chart: music
- No HTML named entity. Write 🎧 or 🎧
Historical Notes
Origins
What the picture depicts, and how that has aged against the hardware people actually own, is a question about the object rather than about the codepoint. The chart records neither.
Unicode
Added in Unicode 6.0, published in 2010, as emoji version E0.6. The formal alias music is unusual on an object character: it says the standard expects the picture to stand for the activity as much as for the equipment.
The text form that exists and is never requested
A variation selector is a codepoint that follows another and asks for a specific presentation. U+FE0E asks for text, U+FE0F for emoji. Only 371 characters have such sequences defined, and for a character that already defaults to emoji — as this one does — the interesting half is U+FE0E, which requests a monochrome glyph. Whether a font actually has one is a separate question, and most emoji fonts do not. An encyclopaedia article on this character's block lays the mechanism out in a table, showing it in a base form, a base plus U+FE0E form and a base plus U+FE0F form side by side.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Headphone
To use the Headphone 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: '\1F3A7';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u{1F3A7}' evaluates to 🎧. In Python source, write '\U0001F3A7'.
The character encodes to F0 9F 8E A7 as UTF-8 bytes and D83C DFA7 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 127911.
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
- U+FE0E after it is a legal request for a text presentation, and it will often be ignored because the font has nothing monochrome to give.
- U+FE0F after it is redundant: this character defaults to emoji presentation already.
- Adding either selector makes the sequence two codepoints, which changes lengths, cursor movement and naive truncation.
- Outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, so a surrogate pair D83C DFA7 in UTF-16 and a naive character count of two before any selector is added.
- Not Emoji_Modifier_Base. East Asian Width Wide; line break class ID.
- No named HTML entity. Write 🎧 or 🎧.
In the Wild
The demonstration table is where this character mostly lives. An encyclopaedia article on its Unicode block sets out a row of characters in three forms — bare, followed by U+FE0E, followed by U+FE0F — and this is one of the twelve it uses to show the mechanism.
A person's use of it is a section heading in a list of programming resources, reading as a headphone followed by the word Podcasts. An encyclopaedia article on headphones contains none of it at all.
Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
Why is the name singular?
That is the name Unicode assigned. It is not an error the standard will correct — names are immutable once published.
Can I make it monochrome?
You can ask, by following it with U+FE0E. Whether you get a text glyph depends entirely on the font.
Is there an earbud emoji?
Not in this subgroup. The music subgroup holds nine fully qualified entries and this is the only headphone among them.
Is there an HTML entity?
No named one. Write 🎧 or 🎧.