About Pile Of Poo
Pile Of Poo is the Unicode character 💩 at codepoint U+1F4A9 in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block of the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP).
Reference
The rare character the standard has drawing advice for. U+1F4A9 sits in Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs, dates from Unicode 6.0, has general category So and carries Emoji_Presentation. Its chart entry is unusually full: a formal alias, dog dirt, and a depiction note reading that it may be depicted with or without a friendly face — an instruction to font vendors rather than a fact about the character, and one of the 120 notes of that kind carried by the standard's 1,438 emoji characters. Unicode's test data files it in the eight-member face-costume subgroup, beside the ghost, the robot, the two aliens, the ogre, the goblin and the clown. CLDR gives it sixteen keywords, the file's maximum length.
Typical uses
- Dismissal and mild disgust, which most of its sixteen keywords describe
- Comic contexts, which the keyword comic names directly
- Not as a face, despite the subgroup — the friendly face is optional by the chart's own note
At a glance
- U+1F4A9, Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs; Unicode 6.0; general category So
- Emoji version E0.6; Emoji_Presentation, so no U+FE0F is needed
- Formal alias dog dirt, plus a depiction note about the optional face
- Sixteen CLDR keywords, the longest list length the file uses
- No HTML named entity. Write 💩 or 💩
Historical Notes
Origins
The character's history before Unicode, and the people involved in getting it there, is unusually well documented — and none of it is in the chart, which carries only the alias and the depiction note.
Unicode
Added in Unicode 6.0, published in 2010, as emoji version E0.6. Its subgroup, face-costume, holds eight fully qualified entries and every one is a single codepoint — the smallest and simplest grouping in the smileys and emotion set.
A note that binds nobody and explains everything
Unicode's charts occasionally carry a line beginning with an asterisk, which is a usage or depiction note rather than an alias or a cross-reference. Here it reads that the character may be depicted with or without a friendly face. That is guidance to whoever draws the glyph, not a conformance requirement, and it is the standard acknowledging that two quite different pictures are both correct for one codepoint. It is also the reason the same message can arrive smiling on one platform and not on another without either being wrong.
Developer Notes
| Unicode Codepoint | |
| Decimal | |
| UTF-8 (hex) | |
| UTF-16 (hex) | |
| HEX Entity | |
| HTML Entity | |
| CSS (\xxxx) | |
| JavaScript | |
| Python |
How to Use Pile Of Poo
To use the Pile Of Poo 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: '\1F4A9';.
In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u{1F4A9}' evaluates to 💩. In Python source, write '\U0001F4A9'.
The character encodes to F0 9F 92 A9 as UTF-8 bytes and D83D DCA9 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 128169.
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
- The face is optional by the chart's own note, so do not rely on the glyph having one.
- Outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, so a surrogate pair D83D DCA9 in UTF-16 and a naive character count of two.
- Not Emoji_Modifier_Base and not a variation-sequence base.
- East Asian Width Wide; line break class ID.
- Its formal alias, dog dirt, is searchable metadata rather than an alternative character.
- No named HTML entity. Write 💩 or 💩.
In the Wild
This character is not confined to charts and annotation files, which makes it a rarity among emoji. Its own encyclopaedia article uses it eight times: in the opening line describing what it represents, in the character-information box beside the name and the encodings, and inside the titles of works cited — including an academic chapter whose title uses the character as a verb. Two more uses appear in a general article on emoji, and one each in two others.
There is a body of writing about this character, and that writing uses it rather than merely naming it. Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.
FAQ
Does it have a face?
Sometimes. The chart says it may be depicted with or without a friendly face, which leaves the decision to each vendor.
What is the alias dog dirt?
A formal alias recorded in the chart — an alternative name for the same character, not a different one.
Why is it grouped with the faces?
Its subgroup is face-costume, which holds creatures and objects that sit in the face part of a keyboard: two aliens, an ogre, a goblin, a clown, a ghost, a robot and this.
Is there an HTML entity?
No named one. Write 💩 or 💩.