A grinning cat face with tears streaming from its eyes mid-laughing-fit — the cat with tears of joy is the feline sibling of the more famous 😂. It's used the same way, for something so funny it hurts, but tends to get pulled out by cat people or for content with an ironic, meme-y edge.
What 😹 means
A yellowish faced cat face with perked up ears, relaxed eyebrows, closed, warm eyes and a wide, toothed cat grin. The emoji also has two huge droplets of tears of joy flowing out of each eye. It is the cat version of the 😂 Face With Tears of Joy emoji.
The 😹 emoji suggests happiness, the cat way of saying LOL, laughter, and a hilarious outburst. It also signifies crying because of sheer bliss and happiness, although its mostly used as a response to something outrageously funny.
How and when to use it
- Send this emoji if someone's cracking cat jokes.
- This can also be used to react to something hilarious (besides cats).
- Send this emoji along with something funny to signal the receiver that its most probably about cats.
- All jokes apart, this emoji can also be used to denote human emotions of laughter and happiness (duh, we made it).
Other Names
- 😹 Laughter
- 😹 Bawling
- 😹 Hilarious
- 😹 Funny
- 😹 Happiness
- 😹 Laughing Cat
- 😹 Happy Tears Cat
- 😹 LOL, ROFL
😹 in real conversations
Is 😹 just the cat version of 😂?
Basically, yes — same tears-streaming, can't-stop-laughing reaction, just wearing whiskers instead of a human face. People reach for 😹 specifically when the joke has a cat angle, or when they want a slightly more meme-flavored, ironic edge than the straightforward 😂 usually carries in a text.
What does 😹 mean under a cat video?
Genuine laughter at whatever the cat just did — knocking something off a shelf, missing a jump badly, staring down its own reflection like it's a threat. It's the default reaction for cat-fail and cat-chaos content specifically, more than for jokes that have nothing to do with cats at all.
Do 😹 and the other cat faces work the same as the human ones?
They map onto them loosely, not exactly. Nine cat faces exist against dozens of human ones, so there's no cat version of most reactions — no cat 🥺, no cat 😐. The ones that do exist cover the big, obvious emotions: laughing, crying, heart eyes, shock. Anything subtler has to go back to a human face.
The lowdown
- Category
- Smileys & Emotion › cat-face
- Codepoints
U+1F639- Emoji version
- Emoji 0.6
- Shortcodes
:joy_cat:- Keywords
- animal, cat, face, joy, laugh, laughing, lol, tear, tears
How it looks across platforms
Seeing a blank box instead of the emoji somewhere? Here's why that happens. Curious why the designs above don't match to begin with? Here's why that happens too.
⚡ Quick round
Which joined the keyboard first — 😹 Cat with Tears of Joy or 🦊 Fox?
Runs with a crowd
😹 keeps company in laughing emojis — tap-to-copy sets for when one emoji isn't enough.