What 🐀 means
A full grey body of a tiny rat, standing on all fours in a sneaky posture, facing left, displaying its long tail, all grey furry skin, round ears, long whiskers, and beady eyes.
This emoji is not to be confused with the 🐁 Mouse emoji which depicts a creature much more accepted by humans. Rats are known for being dirty and unwelcomed and the 🐀 Rat emoji often suggests those characteristics. Different platforms vary in their depictions of this emoji. Some even show the rat looking straight ahead.
How and when to use it
- A suspicious person or someone whose trustworthiness you doubt can be represented through a 🐀.
- Sneaky and suspicious behavior can also be represented through 🐀.
- Timid personalities can also be addressed using a 🐀 emoji.
- If someone close to you has unhygienic habits, and you want to point that out, use the 🐀 emoji along with your concerned texts.
Other Names
- 🐀 Rodent
- 🐀 Mouse
- 🐀 Ratatouille
- 🐀 Sneaky
- 🐀 Undercover
- 🐀 Snitch
- 🐀 Long-Tail
🐀 in real conversations
Why do people call someone a rat?
Betrayal, plain and simple, someone who talked to authorities or spilled secrets that were supposed to stay buried. The slang goes back further than you'd think, an 1859 slang dictionary already defined a rat as 'a sneak, an informer, a turncoat,' and prison and gang culture kept the word alive ever since. There's no soft version of this one.
What does 🐀 mean when someone calls you that?
You've been marked as untrustworthy, someone who flipped sides or told on the group. It's one of the bluntest animal insults out there, sent under screenshots of receipts or after someone gets caught snitching. Unlike 🐭, which reads as cute and shy, 🐀 carries zero affection in any context.
Is 🐀 ever a compliment?
Basically never in slang use. Outside of insults it can just mean an actual pet rat or a Chinese zodiac Rat year, both neutral and literal. But dropped into a conversation about a person, 🐀 is doing exactly one job, calling out a betrayal, so it rarely needs a caption to land.
The lowdown
- Category
- Animals & Nature › animal-mammal
- Codepoints
U+1F400- Emoji version
- Emoji 1.0
- Shortcodes
:rat:- Keywords
- animal, rat
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 — 🐀 Rat or 🧚 Fairy?