Palm out and pushing toward the left, this emoji is a clear physical 'back off' or 'stop right there.' It's used to shut down a bad idea, block someone out of a conversation, or just visually shove something away.
What 🫷 means
A hand pushing to the left, palm flat, as if stopping something — or high-fiving someone coming the other way. The 🫷 Leftwards Pushing Hand emoji (Emoji 15.0, September 2022) is one half of a matched pair with 🫸; together they finally made a proper two-person high five possible.
Solo, it reads as "stop", "hold on", "back up", or setting a boundary — a gentler, more deliberate version of ✋.
How and when to use it
- Boundary-setting with style: "New year rule: no work emails after 7pm 🫷"
- Combine with its partner for the high five that took eleven emoji versions to arrive: 🫷🫸
- Or slow a conversation down: "🫷 wait wait wait — say that again?"
The lowdown
- Category
- People & Body › hand-fingers-open
- Codepoints
U+1FAF7- Emoji version
- Emoji 15.0
- Shortcodes
:leftwards_pushing_hand:- Keywords
- block, five, halt, hand, high, hold, leftward, leftwards, pause, push, pushing, refuse, slap, stop, wait
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.
Skin tone variations
⚡ Quick round
Which joined the keyboard first — 🫷 Leftwards Pushing Hand or 🛶 Canoe?