Boar Emoji

🐗 is a wild boar, shown as a brown, bristly pig with prominent tusks jutting from its lower jaw. Emojipedia describes it as the wild cousin of 🐷 and 🐖, with the tusks doing most of the identifying work. Most vendors show the face, three-quarter angle, while WhatsApp still draws the full body in profile.

It was approved as part of Unicode 6.0 in October 2010 and added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015, giving the emoji set its one proper wild hog. Every other pig emoji is domesticated.

People reach for 🐗 when they want to signal something the pink pig emojis can't: danger, wildness, stubbornness, Japanese zodiac content (where the boar, not the pig, is the twelfth animal), hunting posts, or the English homophone "bore." It also lives a second life online as the face of a viral Memoji meme that has nothing to do with actual boars.

🐗 doesn't fight for the same texting territory as 🐷. It's a specialty emoji with a handful of clear jobs.

On Instagram and TikTok, it's a hunting tag. Hog-hunting content is one of the largest outdoors niches in the United States, with Vanilla Ice posting his own boar hunts in Florida captioned "bringing home the bacon." Captions like "Hog life, best life" and "Less talk, more hogs" anchor the culture. Expect 🐗🔫 and 🐗🌲 in captions from rural Texas, the Southeast, and Australia.

In Japanese posts, 🐗 signals inoshishi (猪), the zodiac animal for people born in 1947, 1959, 1971, 1983, 1995, 2007, and 2019. Japan uses the wild boar for the twelfth zodiac sign instead of the domestic pig that Chinese tradition uses, because "wild boar" carries connotations of courage and valor while the word for pig (豚, buta) has more derogatory weight.

It's also the emoji for "bore." Emojis.com notes that the boar gets drafted as a homophone when someone wants to call a person or a movie boring without writing the word. And on r/comedyheaven and similar meme communities, 🐗 is the "boar head exploding" Memoji, which went viral in late 2022 after a Twitter user used it to react to thirst traps.

The boar is one of the original 722 emojis approved in Unicode 6.0 on October 11, 2010. Its inclusion wasn't a Unicode invention. The DoCoMo and SoftBank carrier sets that Unicode inherited from Japanese mobile phones already had a boar, largely because the wild boar is an important zodiac animal in Japan. Without that Japanese precedent, the world might have gotten a single pig emoji and no boar at all.

In Japanese mobile culture the emoji was always tied to the twelfth zodiac sign, 亥 (inoshishi). That's why Apple and Samsung settled on a brown, bristly, fierce-looking face rather than the round cartoon pig the other members of the family got. The design brief was "zodiac wild boar," not "generic pig in brown."

The design has stayed remarkably consistent across 15 years. Google's Android 7.0 refresh, Apple's iOS 13 redraw, and Samsung's One UI 4.0 version all kept the tusks, the dark coloring, and the three-quarter angle. WhatsApp is the only major platform still rendering it in full body profile, the way the original carrier versions did.

1. 2010Approved as part of Unicode 6.0 and added to Emoji 1.0. Inherited from Japanese carrier sets where it served as the zodiac boar.
2. 2016Google's Android 7.0 refresh redesigns the boar into a tusked, three-quarter-facing head that stayed largely unchanged going forward.
3. 2019Apple iOS 13 adds the boar as a [Memoji sticker pack](https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2492553-boar-head-exploding) option. This is the meme variant, complete with expressions.
4. 2021The "boar head exploding" Memoji first appears on r/comedyheaven in December, racking up 54,100 upvotes.
5. 2022A Twitter user uses the exploding-head Memoji to react to thirst traps, generating 296,800 likes and pushing the boar into meme canon.
6. 2025Search volume for "wild boar" spikes as [African Swine Fever cases in European boars double](https://efsa.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.2903/j.efsa.2025.9436) compared to the previous year.

• •🐗 is the only "wild" emoji in the pig family. Every other pig emoji, including 🐷 🐖 🐽, shows a domestic pink animal. Emojipedia's boar entry is explicit that the tusks and brown coat exist to signal wildness.
• •Japan is the reason 🐗 exists at all. DoCoMo and SoftBank's original carrier sets included the boar because it's the twelfth zodiac animal in Japan, inoshishi, not the domestic pig used in China.
• •Hong Kong had 929 wild boar complaints in 2018, more than triple the number from five years earlier. SCMP's interactive estimates 2,000 to 3,000 boars now live inside the city.
• •Feral hogs cost US agriculture roughly $1.6 billion a year, with Texas alone accounting for $871 million of the damage. The US population is estimated at six million.
• •The "boar head exploding" Memoji that went viral on Reddit and Twitter was released by Apple in September 2019 as part of a standard iOS 13 Memoji pack. Know Your Meme notes it sat unused for two full years before going viral.
• •In Norse mythology, the god Freyr rode a golden boar named Gullinbursti whose bristles lit up the dark. He's the reason Yule celebrations historically involved roasted boar.
• •European ASF outbreaks in wild boars nearly doubled in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. Germany went from 123 cases in 2024 to over 1,600 in 2025.
• •Wild boars are excellent swimmers and have crossed to multiple Mediterranean islands under their own power, including Corsica and Sardinia.
• •The 🐗 emoji is the go-to shorthand for "bore" as a pun. Emojis.com documents this homophone use across film reviews and personality roasts.

• •Asterix and Obelix: Obelix's obsession with roasting and eating wild boars is one of the longest-running gags in European comics. The 🐗 emoji shows up in every French, Belgian, and German fan post about the franchise.
• •Princess Mononoke (1997): Studio Ghibli's Nago, a boar god turned demon, opens the film. The Ghibli wiki calls him the catalyst for the entire plot. Anime fans use 🐗 when referencing the movie or cosplaying its boar clan.
• •Monster Hunter series: Kelbi and Bullfango, the early-zone boars that new hunters kill by the dozen, are the game's running joke. 🐗 is all over Monster Hunter Wilds clips and speedrun chat.
• •Harry Potter: Ernie Macmillan's Patronus is a boar, and the Hog's Head Inn in Hogsmeade keeps 🐗 in Potter fan posts regularly.
• •Norse mythology (Gullinbursti): Freyr's golden boar Gullinbursti pulls his chariot and lights the way with glowing bristles. Heathen and Viking-history accounts use 🐗 to tag Yule and fertility posts.
• •Arkansas Razorbacks: The live mascot Tusk VI is an actual Russian boar. Razorbacks athletics travels him to football games. SEC fans use 🐗 in college-sports posts and during the annual Texas A&M matchup.