🆘

SOS Button Emoji 🆘

The letters 'SOS' boxed in red, the sos-button emoji is the squared word-badge version of a distress call. It's used for genuine emergencies and, more often, for exaggerated cries for help — a chaotic week, a deadline closing in, anything that feels like it needs rescuing.

What 🆘 means

Three capital letters, 'SOS' in white, pasted onto a bright and catchy red square. The 🆘 SOS Button emoji expands to 'Save Our Souls/Ships'. It signifies danger, pleading and a need for rescue or saving.

How and when to use it

If you're sharing a post/repost either on your feed or story about something that needs immediate help and attention you can use 🆘. For instance, "Burning building on street 11. Please. If anyone's around, alert the news! 🆘" or "Go! He needs your help, dude 🆘".
You could also drop 🆘 as an emergency. Like, "Emergency!!! Get to the hosp 🆘" or "Waiting for the rescue operators to get here 🆘". Also, using 🆘 without any verbatim also conveys the same message.
🆘 was originally a morse code used way back in the 1910s. Nonetheless, you can still use this emoji either as a reference to morse codes in general or even in its authentic meaning; "Save Our Ships".
Some examples for the previous point are - "We really need a language of our own 🆘 It's impossible to communicate without the others listening" or "Could you please save my ship here? 🆘 The person you set me up with is leaving. Um. Hello?? Bestfriend??".

Other Names

🆘 Save Our Souls
🆘 Save Our Ships
🆘 SOS Signal
🆘 White SOS on White Square
🆘 Morse Code
🆘 Distress Signal
🆘 Emergency
🆘 SOS Sign
🆘 Squared SOS

The lowdown

Category: Symbols › alphanum
Codepoints: U+1F198
Emoji version: Emoji 0.6
Shortcodes: :sos:
Keywords: button, help, SOS

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.