There are three mice on your keyboard and this is the one nobody uses. 🐭 mouse face came first, in the original carrier import, and it won outright: the round grey head with big ears is what people mean when they say "mouse emoji". This full-body version arrived later, in Emoji 1.0, paired with rat — the two were added together specifically so the standard could tell the rodents apart, since the cartoon head can't.
Which leaves 🐁 in an awkward spot. It is the accurate mouse: profile view, on all fours, tail out, usually white or pale grey. It also looks less like a mouse to most readers than the cartoon does, and at message size the difference between it and the rat comes down to proportions almost nobody is going to inspect. If the mouse-versus-rat distinction matters to your sentence, write the word.
Its real niche is literal — pest control, lab animals, biology, anywhere a small quadruped rodent is genuinely the subject. Everything figurative goes to 🐭: quiet as a mouse, timid, cute. And if you meant the thing next to your keyboard, that's computer mouse, a separate character that Unicode was careful to keep apart and that typing habits routinely blur back together.
About Mouse
Mouse is the Unicode character 🐁 at codepoint U+1F401 in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs 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 Mouse
To use the Mouse 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: '\1F401';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u{1F401}' evaluates to 🐁. In Python source, write '\U0001F401'.
The character encodes to F0 9F 90 81 as UTF-8 bytes and D83D DC01 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 128001.
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.