Emojis are everywhere. They appear in social media feeds, text messages, commercials, products and more. The number of characters continues to grow every year, and the digital language of emoji, to evolve.
Sometimes it can be difficult to determine the meaning of emoticons in WhatsApp or social media correspondence. Although at first glance it may seem like a simple task, deciphering the meaning of emoticons can be different, depending on the context.
In recent years, the use of certain emoji on the Internet has become a test of age. Younger users of the web are becoming fashionable for emoticons, while millennials and those older don’t always understand what they mean.
Emoji have become an important part of Internet culture: according to statistics, you can find at least one emoji in every 5 tweets. But with each year emoji are evolving faster and faster, and now an ordinary, seemingly emoticon begins to mean something completely different from what it meant a couple of years ago. One such emoji is the Skull Emoji.
Description
The Skull emoticon is an emoji with the image of a human skull in cartoon style with large black eye sockets.
The skull icon itself was added to Unicode in 2010. It wasn’t very popular, and was mostly used to describe something scary. However, the fact is that the image added to the Unicode looks different on different devices. So, Apple’s skull looks pretty cute, which probably contributed to the fact that today the meaning of this emoji is extremely far from the original.
Types
There are two types of the Skull Emoji, which have similar meanings.
💀The Skull emoticon is code U+1F480, with which it was added to the Faces and Emotions section of Unicode 6.0 in 2010, and then was included in the Emoji 1.0 set in 2015. To copy and paste the Skull emoji into HTML, you need to use the code 💀. This emoji has no gender differences or color alternatives. The Skull emoticon is already quite established, so it should have support on most devices. This skull does not have a part of a jaw, unlike the next one.
️☠️The Skull and Bones emoji. It was assigned the code U+2620 U+FE0F, with which it was added to the Faces and Emotions section of the Unicode 1.1 standard in 1993. To copy and paste the Skull and Bones emoticon in HTML, use the code ☠️.
It should be highlighted that both emoji are a whitish gray color with large black eyeballs, in the design of some platforms, such as Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, etc., it is white or lead.
Meaning
Literally, the skull emoticon means death or actual mortal danger. It can be used in cautionary messages or in warnings about the risk of mortal danger.
However, in the early 2020s, the skull emoji stopped being used with a negative context. Generation Z added another meaning to it. Today, the best way to show your face among millennials and members of Generation Z is to respond with a skull emoji to a good joke or comical situation. The point is that today’s teens and young adults increasingly use the phrase “I’m dead” in the meaning of “very funny”.
But it is not all. One of the meanings of Skull Emoji is “An awkward pause,” or the embarrassment of that pause. In a figurative sense skull emoji means figurative death, when a person “dies” from boredom or longing, from a strong laugh or deep disappointment.
It is also sometimes used as a symbol of someone losing too much weight, or for messages that a person is “starving to death.”
As you can see, sometimes the images on the emoji is extremely ambiguous, and can carry hidden meanings, so be careful.
