Tiger

U+1F405

So Emojis Animals & Nature Animal-mammal Chinese New Year

About Tiger

Tiger is the Unicode character 🐅 at codepoint U+1F405 in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block of the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP).

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Reference

The full-body tiger, not the face. U+1F405 sits in Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs with general category So, dates from Unicode 6.0, carries Emoji_Presentation, and is annotated "third of the signs of the Asian zodiac". Its counterpart U+1F42F TIGER FACE is a separate character in the same block, and the pairing is systematic rather than incidental: U+1F400 to U+1F41F holds whole animals, most of them zodiac signs, while U+1F42D to U+1F43C holds a run of faces — mouse, cow, tiger, rabbit, cat, dragon, horse, monkey, dog, pig, frog, hamster, wolf, bear and panda. Several animals therefore exist in the standard twice, under two codepoints with two names.

Typical uses

Zodiac and calendar contexts, which the annotation records
Text where the whole animal is meant rather than a face
Anywhere the face variant would read as cute and the full body would not

At a glance

U+1F405, Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs; Unicode 6.0; general category So
Emoji version E1.0; Emoji_Presentation, so no U+FE0F is needed
Annotated "third of the signs of the Asian zodiac"
U+1F42F TIGER FACE is a separate character, not a variant of this one
No HTML named entity. Write 🐅 or 🐅

Historical Notes

Origins

The tiger's place in the zodiac, and in the cultures that keep it, is not something the encoding takes up. The chart carries one annotation — "third of the signs of the Asian zodiac" — and stops there.

Unicode

Added in Unicode 6.0 and published as emoji version E1.0. It sits in the animal run that opens the block at U+1F400, where twenty-five codepoints carry zodiac annotations.

Why two runs

The carrier sets Unicode merged in 2010 had drawn animals both ways — some as whole creatures in profile, some as heads facing forward — and the standard encoded both rather than picking one. The result is two parallel runs in a single block, the whole animals at U+1F400 and the faces at U+1F42D, with about a dozen species appearing in each. The zodiac annotations attach to the first run only: the faces carry none. So the character a calendar wants and the character a message wants are usually different codepoints, and only one of them is documented as a zodiac sign.

Developer Notes

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

How to Use Tiger

To use the Tiger 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: '\1F405';. In JavaScript and TypeScript the escape '\u{1F405}' evaluates to 🐅. In Python source, write '\U0001F405'.

The character encodes to F0 9F 90 85 as UTF-8 bytes and D83D DC05 as UTF-16 code units. Its decimal codepoint is 128005.

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+1F42F TIGER FACE is a different character. Substituting one for the other changes the data, not just the picture.
Outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, so a surrogate pair in UTF-16 and a naive character count of two.
Not Emoji_Modifier_Base; no skin tone applies.
Nothing in the character data links the whole-animal and face characters to each other — there is no cross-reference and no decomposition. A mapping between them has to be built by hand.
East Asian Width Wide; line break class ID.
No named HTML entity. Write 🐅 or 🐅.

In the Wild

An encyclopaedia article on the tiger contains no tiger emoji — and no other animal emoji either. An article on the Chinese zodiac likewise contains none.

That is the clearest form this takes: long, detailed writing about an animal never once reaches for the character that depicts it. Where the tiger does appear it is a cell in a Unicode block chart.

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

FAQ

Is the tiger face the same character?

No. U+1F42F TIGER FACE is separate, with its own name and codepoint, in a different run of the same block.

Why are there two?

Because the carrier sets Unicode merged had drawn animals both ways, and the standard encoded both rather than choosing.