🪳

Cockroach Emoji 🪳

Unicode's 2019 proposal for this one listed nuclear winter as an actual use case, half-joking that cockroaches will still be around to use it. In practice it's typed about an infestation, a grim apartment, or the general ick of something scuttling where it shouldn't.

What 🪳 means

A flat brown body with varying shades of the same color all across the body, a tiny head with a pair of black eyes and brown antennas, and 6 legs with three on either side of the body.

The 🪳 Cockroach emoji refers to the common human-enemy, roaches. This emoji signifies survival, intrusion, unwelcome guests, and a sense of disgust and discomfort expressed towards these creatures by humans (ironically, cockroaches feel the same way about us too).

How and when to use it

If you're ranting about a roach infestation in your apartment to someone, you can use 🪳 in such scenarios (after calling pest control, of course).
Since cockroaches are almost impossible to destroy and have one of the highest survival rates amongst many insects, 🪳 can be used to refer to a person, a situation, or even a business that resonates with such traits.
Believe it or not, cockroaches have been around since the time of the dinosaurs. So, 🪳 can be used to signify someone or something who's been around for as long as you can remember. For instance, "Man, that woman's so old, I remember seeing her since I was 6 years old and SHE NEVER AGES! 🪳".
🪳 can be used in the contexts of 'pests', 'insects', and 'crawlers' or even just the word 'crawl'. Like, "Oh I'm sorry, was I suppose to crawl onto your feet for forgiveness? 🪳".
If you're sharing posts that have roaches in it, then you must use 🪳 in such captions, it can be pictures and/or videos from your own gallery or even a repost/retweet.

Other Names

🪳 Roaches
🪳 Palmetto Bug (Florida Woods Cockroach)
🪳 Brown Bug
🪳 Water Bug
🪳 Croton Bug (German Cockroach)
🪳 Oggy and the Cockroaches
🪳 Vermin
🪳 Insect
🪳 Crawly
🪳 Pest

The lowdown

Category: Animals & Nature › animal-bug
Codepoints: U+1FAB3
Emoji version: Emoji 13.0
Shortcodes: :cockroach:
Keywords: animal, cockroach, insect, pest, roach

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.