🧅

Onion Emoji 🧅

A round onion bulb with its papery outer layer, the onion emoji is a cooking-staple used for recipes and the ritual of crying while you chop one. It also lends itself to the idiom of an onion's 'layers' — something complicated that reveals more the deeper you dig.

What 🧅 means

A perfectly round vegetable with a pointy tip on top and a slightly hairy stem bud at the bottom. The emoji is designed in a subtle pinkish-orange shade, which might be darker on some platforms.

Considering the amount of visual discomfort onions can cause, the 🧅 Onion emoji can signify tears (not stemming from sadness, thankfully). It can also suggest spice, pungency, privacy, and a sense of having more sides or layers to something or someone (sure you can think of one).

How and when to use it

In a casual chat, if someone said something that they assumed would offend you, you can use 🧅 in that conversation. Like, "Omg. I cannot begin to express how much I'm crying about it rn 🧅". It can be vice versa too.
Are you talking about something or someone who seems to have more to them than what meets the eye, then you can use 🧅 to describe that situation, person, or even a conversation.
Use 🧅 while sharing pictures of onion-based edibles like onion rings.
Don't limit the use of 🧅 to just onions that look like the emoji, it can be used for all types and forms of onions and for spring onions too!
You can use 🧅 in contexts of catfishing as well 😬.
If you're sharing a picture, the caption for which would revolve around the grounds of 'masks', 'layers', etc, then guess what, you can use 🧅 in that caption.

Other Names

🧅 Bulb Onion
🧅 Common Onion
🧅 Shallot
🧅 Scallion
🧅 Spring Onion
🧅 White Onion
🧅 Potato Onion
🧅 Leek
🧅 Chive
🧅 Chinese Onion

The lowdown

Category: Food & Drink › food-vegetable
Codepoints: U+1F9C5
Emoji version: Emoji 12.0
Shortcodes: :onion:
Keywords: flavoring, onion

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.