Angry Face With Horns Emoji

A purple face with furrowed brows, a scowl, and two devil horns. This is the angry twin of 😈. Same face, same horns, opposite expression. Where 😈 smiles and flirts, 👿 frowns and seethes. Its official Unicode name is Imp, a word with a genuinely strange history: in Old English, "impa" meant a young shoot of a plant. By the 1300s it meant a child. By the 1500s, phrases like "imp of the devil" made it specifically a devil's child. By the 1600s, it meant any mischievous kid. The emoji preserves a 500-year-old insult.

In texting, 👿 expresses frustrated anger with a theatrical edge. It's too cartoonish to be genuinely threatening but too angry to be playful. People use it when they're mad about something specific but want to keep the tone light: "My flight got canceled AGAIN 👿" or "They ate the leftovers I was saving 👿." It sits between 😤 (frustrated but human) and 🤬 (explicit rage). Think of it as rage cosplay.

Emojipedia's Emojiology column notes that 👿 was one of the earliest emojis, appearing on SoftBank's Japanese keyboards in 1999 as a full-body blue demon with bat-like wings, a tail, and horns. It looked nothing like the modern purple face. The demon got cropped into a face sometime around 2010, and the wings, tail, and body disappeared forever.

👿 gets overshadowed by 😈 in almost every context. Google Trends shows 😈 gets 5x more search interest. The reason is simple: texting culture rewards playfulness over anger. 😈 says "I'm being naughty and I like it." 👿 says "I'm being naughty and I'm mad about something." The second one comes up less often.

When 👿 does appear, it's usually in three situations. First, exaggerated frustration: "Traffic was 2 hours today 👿" (you're angry but not at the person you're texting). Second, revenge fantasies: "Wait until I get home 👿" (performative menace that both sides know is a joke). Third, Halloween and spooky contexts where any devil face works.

The emoji has a small but dedicated fan base among people who think 😈 is too flirty for their message. If you want to say "I'm furious" without the sexual undertone that 😈 carries, 👿 is the alternative. The frown cancels the flirt.

The word "imp" has one of the stranger etymology paths in English. In Old English (before 1100), "impa" meant a young shoot of a plant, a graft. By the 1300s, it was used metaphorically for a child, the "young shoot" of a family tree. By the 1500s, people started saying "imp of the devil" or "imp of Satan," applying the child metaphor to hell's offspring. By the 1600s, the devil part stuck and "imp" became shorthand for a small, mischievous demon. When Unicode approved this emoji in 2010, they named it IMP, preserving a word whose meaning has drifted continuously for a thousand years.

In European folklore, imps were minor demons who caused trouble but weren't powerful enough to be genuinely dangerous. They were the lowest tier of hell's org chart: annoying pests rather than apocalyptic threats. Imps served as familiar spirits for witches during the witch trial era, and during the Pendle witch trials of 1612, alleged imps were cited as evidence of witchcraft. The line between "imp" and "black cat" was blurry at best.

The most famous imp in English history is the Lincoln Imp, a stone carving inside Lincoln Cathedral dating to 1250-1280. Legend says the Devil sent two imps to cause havoc in the cathedral. They smashed windows and knocked over the Dean. An angel turned one imp to stone, and it's been sitting in the Angel Choir ever since. The carving became Lincoln's city symbol and the mascot of Lincoln City F.C.

The emoji started life in 1999 on SoftBank's Japanese keyboards as something completely different: a full-body blue demon with bat-like wings, a tail, and long horns, laughing maniacally. It looked like a D&D miniature, not a face emoji. When the emoji was standardized for Unicode in 2010, the body was cropped away, the wings and tail vanished, the color shifted to purple, and the expression changed from manic laughter to angry frown. The demon became a disembodied head.

First appeared on SoftBank Japanese keyboards in 1999 as a full-body blue demon with bat wings, a tail, and long horn-like ears. The au by KDDI version (2002) showed a creature with lopsided ears wielding a pitchfork. Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F47FU+1F47F IMP. The official name is "Imp," not "Devil," though it was later given the CLDR name "angry face with horns." Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. Paired with 😈 Smiling Face With Horns (U+1F608U+1F608) as the angry/friendly devil pair.

1. 1250The Lincoln Imp is carved inside Lincoln Cathedral, England. It becomes the city's symbol.↗
2. 1999SoftBank includes a full-body blue demon with bat wings and tail on Japanese phone keyboards↗
3. 2002au by KDDI creates its own version: a creature with lopsided ears and a pitchfork
4. 2010Unicode 6.0 approves U+1F47F IMP. The body, wings, and tail are cropped; only the face remains↗
5. 2015Added to Emoji 1.0. Apple's purple face with horns and scowl becomes the dominant design

In Western culture, the imp/devil is a Christian concept: a minor demon associated with temptation and sin. The emoji's angry face and horns read as "devilish anger" within that framework.

In Japanese culture, the demon tradition is different. The oni (鬼) is the default demon figure, represented by the separate 👹 Ogre emoji. The imp emoji (👿) was originally designed on SoftBank keyboards more like a generic akuma (悪魔, devil/demon) than a specifically Western imp. When it crossed into the Unicode standard, the Western imp framing took over.

The emoji reads differently across generations too. Older users tend to use 👿 to express genuine anger with a supernatural flair. Younger users mostly skip it for 😈 because the flirty version is more useful in daily texting. 👿's anger makes it a niche choice in a culture that prefers playful emoji.

• •The emoji's official Unicode name is IMP, not "devil" or "demon." An imp in folklore is a minor demon who causes trouble but isn't powerful enough to be genuinely dangerous. It's the intern of hell.
• •The Lincoln Imp is a stone carving inside Lincoln Cathedral, England, dating to 1250-1280. Legend says the Devil sent two imps to wreak havoc. An angel turned one to stone. The carving became Lincoln's city symbol and the mascot of Lincoln City F.C.
• •During the Pendle witch trials of 1612, alleged imps (which were usually just pets) were cited as evidence of witchcraft. If you had a black cat, you might have an "imp."
• •SoftBank's 1999 Japanese version was a full-body blue demon with bat wings, a tail, and fangs. It looked like a character from a JRPG. When Unicode standardized it in 2010, they cropped it to just a purple face. The most dramatic emoji redesign in history.
• •The word "imp" evolved from Old English "impa" (young plant shoot) → "child" (1300s) → "child of the devil" (1500s) → "mischievous demon" (1600s). A word about gardening became a word about demonology through a thousand years of metaphor drift.
• •👿 is the older sibling that nobody likes as much. It existed on Japanese keyboards since 1999, over a decade before 😈 was standardized. But when both entered Unicode, the smiling version became the popular one. Turns out people prefer playful evil over angry evil.

• •People confuse 👿 with 😈 all the time. The difference is the expression: 👿 frowns (angry), 😈 smiles (flirty). At small sizes on some phones they can look similar, but the emotional signals are opposite. Using the wrong one in a flirty conversation vs an angry vent can cause confusion.
• •Some people think 👿 is threatening. It's not. The cartoon style and purple color make it theatrical rather than menacing. If someone sends 👿 they're performing anger, not expressing genuine hostility.
• •👿 is sometimes used interchangeably with 👹 (Japanese oni), but they're from completely different mythological traditions. 👿 is a Western European imp. 👹 is a Japanese demon.

• •The Lincoln Imp is the most famous imp in English history: a stone carving in Lincoln Cathedral from the 1280s that became the city's symbol and the mascot of Lincoln City F.C.
• •In Dungeons & Dragons, imps are CR 1 fiends that serve as familiars for warlocks and minor servants of archdevils. The D&D imp is one of the most recognizable depictions of the creature in modern pop culture.
• •SoftBank's 1999 version of this emoji was a full-body blue demon that looked more like a Final Fantasy enemy than a face emoji. The redesign from full demon to cropped face is one of the biggest visual transformations in emoji history.

• •👿 is U+1F47FU+1F47F. Its original Unicode name is IMP, and its CLDR short name is "angry face with horns." Both names appear in different APIs and documentation.
• •Common shortcodes: :imp::imp: (GitHub, Slack, Discord). Note: :imp::imp: gives you 👿 (angry), :smiling_imp::smiling_imp: gives you 😈 (smiling). Easy to mix up.
• •Part of the Smileys & People category (subcategory: face-costume), alongside 👹 Ogre, 👺 Goblin, 💀 Skull, and 👻 Ghost.

See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.