🗜️

Clamp Emoji 🗜️

This is a bench vice or C-clamp, screw and all, not the spring-loaded office clamp its name might suggest. It's typed for being "in a vice," squeezed by a deadline or a tough spot, more often than for anything actually being clamped down.

What 🗜️ means

A metal clamp with a curved solid frame to the right, attached to the top of a long screw with a metal handle, ending in a gradual circular stamp-like tip or the movable jaw, above the fixed jaw.

The 🗜️ Clamp emoji represents the device necessary for holding things together. Essentially, this emoji would signify fastening, binding, and keeping things together, while also maybe inflicting suffocation at the same time.

How and when to use it

🗜️ may also be considered a compression clamp. Hence, if you're metaphorically talking about concising something or reducing its mass either to fit a bracket or otherwise, you may use this emoji.
Examples for the previous point: "Nothing great was ever achieved by compressing passion 🗜️" or "You can try. But you cannot compress my talent into just a few words 🗜️".
Clamps negate even the minutest chance of motion. If you're referring to a person, situation, or anything that fits this description (positively or negatively), you may use 🗜️. For instance, "You cannot expect something to grow if you don't give it the space it needs 🗜️".
Speaking of motionlessness or a sense of being fixed or fixated, you can use 🗜️ figuratively in the same context - "Fixation is the way to death 🗜️ Fluidity is the way to life".
Use 🗜️ even while literally talking about compression, like compressed oils. Like, "Try our first-ever compressed castor oil! 🗜️".
Clamps come in variety, and you can use 🗜️ to refer to all of them.

Other Names

🗜️ Compression Clamp
🗜️ Compression
🗜️ Metal Clamp
🗜️ Fastener
🗜️ Brace
🗜️ Holdfast
🗜️ Table Vice
🗜️ WinZip
🗜️ Capo

The lowdown

Category: Objects › tool
Codepoints: U+1F5DC U+FE0F
Emoji version: Emoji 0.7
Shortcodes: :clamp: GitHub
Keywords: clamp, compress, tool, vice

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.