The newest tool on this shelf, approved by Unicode in 2024 and still rolling out to phones through 2025. It covers actual digging and gardening, plus the idiom "dig yourself into a hole," making a bad situation worse with every shovelful.
What means
A sturdy digging shovel with a broad blade and a handle — the tool for garden beds, snow-buried driveways, and building sites. The Shovel emoji covers honest manual work in all its forms: digging, planting, clearing, and burying.
Internet culture gave it a second job the moment it arrived (Emoji 16.0, September 2024): "digging" into gossip, research rabbit holes, and — when someone is making a bad situation worse — the timeless advice to stop digging.
How and when to use it
- Literal first: gardening, landscaping, snow days. "30cm overnight. Me and the have plans this morning."
- For deep-dive content and research: "Spent all Sunday through the archives for this story — worth it."
- And for friends committed to a losing argument: "You could just apologize… or keep going with the I guess."
The lowdown
- Category
- Objects › tool
- Codepoints
U+1FA8F- Emoji version
- Emoji 16.0
- Shortcodes
:shovel:Slack- Keywords
- bury, dig, garden, hole, plant, scoop, shovel, snow, spade
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 — Shovel or 🦷 Tooth?