🌔

Waxing Gibbous Moon Emoji 🌔

What 🌔 means

A golden moon with a thin dark crescent on the left side of the moon. There are crater details throughout the moon, which are sometimes shown as polka dots.

Representing the fourth phase of the lunar cycle, the 🌔 Waxing Gibbous Moon emoji signifies visibility that's more than half. With the moon revealing more than just half of itself, this emoji may have its own range of metaphorical interpretations.

How and when to use it

If you're texting your bestie about how you feel terrible and maybe even cringed out for saying/doing more than you should've, you can use 🌔. Like, "Dude. I feel like throwing up for giving that random colleague of mine so many deets about my private life, ugh 🌔".
In a very similar context, you can use 🌔 while sharing something that was overdone or said; it can be a fashion post, a political post, a meme, a hilarious incident you're recalling, etc.
On a philosophical level of understanding, 🌔 may also signify perfection in the making (the entire moon representing perfection) - "I'm working on my masterpiece 🌔 ~ Jessie J ".
The moon, in this phase, is neither half nor full. So, in the same pattern of usage, you may use 🌔 as a way of emoji-fying motivation or the zeal to completeness. For example, "I have enough to begin and enough to endure. All I need now is to get to the top 🌔".

Other Names

🌔 Waxing Gibbous Moon Symbol
🌔 Fourth Phase of the Lunar Cycle
🌔 Phases of the Moon
🌔 More Than Half and Less Than Full
🌔 Lunar Cycle
🌔 Waxing Gibbous
🌔 Gibbous Moon

🌔 in real conversations

What does 'gibbous' actually mean?

It's from the Latin gibbus, meaning humped or bulging — a fitting name for a moon that's more than half lit but hasn't quite filled out into a full circle yet. 🌔 is the waxing version, growing toward full; 🌖 is the same bulging shape on the way back down after it.

How many days sit between 🌔 and an actual full moon?

Roughly three or four — waxing gibbous covers the stretch where the disc is over half lit but still visibly missing a sliver on the left, right up until that sliver closes and it becomes 🌕. It's the anticipation phase, astronomically speaking.

Is 🌔 used for anything besides marking the actual lunar phase?

Rarely — this is one of the more purely functional emoji in the set, showing up almost entirely in real moon-phase charts, astrology feeds and stargazing captions rather than as slang for a mood. The phases with faces carry the figurative weight; the plain gibbous phases mostly just report where the moon actually is.

The lowdown

Category: Travel & Places › sky & weather
Codepoints: U+1F314
Emoji version: Emoji 0.6
Shortcodes: :moon: GitHub · Slack:waxing_gibbous_moon:
Keywords: gibbous, moon, space, waxing

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.