Eight legs and unmistakably creepy, the spider emoji taps straight into arachnophobia — it's the go-to for something scary, gross, or Halloween-appropriate. It shows up heavily in October alongside webs and pumpkins, and gets dropped whenever someone spots one and needs to broadcast their horror.
What 🕷️ means
This spider, shown full length, has a black body, eight thin legs with four on each side, and a tiny head that may carry other details not visible here.
The 🕷️ Spider emoji refers to a black house spider, but as a generic emoji, it can be used for all spider species. Although these crawlers can signify human disgust and fear towards them, it suggests hard work, persistence, 'trying again', and pest-control (since they eat up other insects).
How and when to use it
- Since spiders and spider webs signify a sense of abandonment when it comes to a house, 🕷️ would be a great emoji to use in the context of 'Halloween'.
- Building on the previous point, if you're posting a Halloween look of yours or someone else's that you loved, you can use 🕷️ in that post caption especially if there was spider makeup or a spider outfit design.
- If you're terrified of spiders, and you just happened to see one, you can use 🕷️ while texting someone close about the near-death experience you had (after you've ran into a safe spot, of course). For instance, "I ALMOST DIED!!! THERE'S A SPIDER IN THE KITCHEN 🕷️",
- If the picture you're posting needs to have a caption that revolves around the theme of 'persistence', you can use 🕷️ in such contexts.
- Are you a Spiderman fan? Or you just find spiders and/or this emoji really cool? If so, you can use 🕷️ in your social media profile name.
- Use 🕷️ while sharing some personal spider photography on your social media handle or even while reposting someone else's.
Other Names
- 🕷️ Black House Spider
- 🕷️ Tarantula
- 🕷️ Daddy Long Legs (aka cellar spiders)
- 🕷️ Spiderman
- 🕷️ Spidey
- 🕷️ Crawlies
- 🕷️ Wolf Spider
🕷️ in real conversations
Is 🕷️ different from 🕸️?
Yes — 🕷️ is the spider itself, and 🕸️ is just the web, empty and waiting. They team up constantly for Halloween posts, the web setting the scene and the spider doing the actual scaring, but they're two separate emoji doing two separate jobs, and only one of them has legs.
What does 🕷️ mean when someone actually spots one?
Pure, unfiltered horror — dropped the second a real spider turns up somewhere it has no business being, a shower, a shoe, the ceiling above the bed. It's less a description and more a scream in emoji form, and it leans hard into Halloween territory too, alongside pumpkins and cobwebs every October.
Why does 🕷️ sometimes show up as a plain black outline instead of full color?
Because both 🕷️ and 🕸️ default to a flat, text-style rendering unless an invisible extra character tells the device to draw them in full emoji color instead. Most modern keyboards handle that switch automatically, so it's rare to see the plain version now, but it can still slip through on older software or certain fonts.
The lowdown
- Category
- Animals & Nature › animal-bug
- Codepoints
U+1F577 U+FE0F- Emoji version
- Emoji 0.7
- Shortcodes
:spider:GitHub- Keywords
- animal, insect, spider
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 — 🕷️ Spider or 🐂 Ox?
Runs with a crowd
🕷️ keeps company in black emojis and halloween emojis and skull emojis — tap-to-copy sets for when one emoji isn't enough.