Snail

U+1F40C

About Snail

Snail is the Unicode character 🐌 at codepoint U+1F40C in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block of the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP).

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Reference

The zodiac's most surprising entry. U+1F40C sits in Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs with general category So, dates from Unicode 6.0, and carries Emoji_Presentation. Its chart annotation reads "fifth of the signs of the Asian zodiac, used in Kazakhstan" — and three other characters carry a fifth-sign annotation: U+1F409 DRAGON with no regional clause, and U+1F40A CROCODILE and U+1F40B WHALE, both marked as used in Persia. Of the twenty-five zodiac annotations in the standard, this is the only one naming Kazakhstan. Unicode's test data files the character in the animal-bug subgroup, which holds sixteen fully qualified emoji.

Typical uses

Messaging where slowness is the idea
Zodiac and calendar contexts, where the annotation is the reason it is there
Nature and garden writing, as one of a small set of encoded invertebrates

At a glance

U+1F40C, Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs; Unicode 6.0; general category So
Emoji version E0.6; Emoji_Presentation, so no U+FE0F is needed
Annotated "fifth of the signs of the Asian zodiac, used in Kazakhstan"
Filed under animal-bug, alongside the butterfly
No HTML named entity. Write 🐌 or 🐌

Historical Notes

Origins

Why one calendrical tradition substitutes a snail for a dragon is a question for the traditions rather than for the encoding; the chart annotation states the fact and explains nothing.

Unicode

Added in Unicode 6.0 and published as emoji version E0.6. Its position at U+1F40C places it inside the zodiac run rather than among the later insects, which is the encoding's own evidence about why it is there.

What the annotations are actually doing

Twenty-five codepoints in the whole standard carry a zodiac annotation and every one is between U+1F400 and U+1F418. Read together they are a small comparative table: twelve signs, with regional substitutes recorded for the second, fourth, fifth, eighth, tenth and twelfth. Vietnam is named three times, Persia five, Japan once, Thailand once, Kazakhstan once — here. That is the standard doing something it usually avoids, which is recording cultural detail in a chart. It did so because the substitutions are the reason several near-duplicate animals had to be encoded at all.

Developer Notes

Unicode Codepoint
Decimal
UTF-8 (hex)
UTF-16 (hex)
HEX Entity
HTML Entity
CSS (\xxxx)
JavaScript
Python

How to Use Snail

To use the Snail 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: '\1F40C';. In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u{1F40C}' evaluates to 🐌. In Python source, write '\U0001F40C'.

The character encodes to F0 9F 90 8C as UTF-8 bytes and D83D DC0C as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 128012.

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

Outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, so a surrogate pair in UTF-16 and a naive character count of two.
Not Emoji_Modifier_Base, so no skin tone applies and no tone sequence is defined.
Not a variation-sequence base either — it is Emoji_Presentation and there is no text form to request.
The zodiac annotation is chart prose. Nothing in the machine-readable property files encodes it, so software cannot query it.
East Asian Width Wide; line break class ID.
No named HTML entity. Write 🐌 or 🐌.

In the Wild

An encyclopaedia article on snails contains no animal emoji at all. Neither does the article on the Chinese zodiac — which is where this character's own annotation points, and the one page most likely to have reached for it.

Both are long, fully loaded pages that simply write the animals in words. This character's own appearance is a cell in a Unicode block chart.

Pages change; this is what those showed on the day.

FAQ

Is the fifth sign really a snail?

The chart annotation records that it is, in Kazakhstan. Elsewhere it is a dragon, and Unicode also notes a crocodile and a whale for the same sign in Persia.

Why is a snail in the middle of the mammals?

Because the run at U+1F400 is ordered by the zodiac cycle rather than by taxonomy.