Boy Emoji

A young male child. 👦 is one of the four age-based person emojis that shipped in the founding Unicode 6.0 release in 2010: 👶 (baby), 👦 (boy), 👨 (man), 👴 (old man). The 2010 batch was built on the Japanese carrier sets (DoCoMo, KDDI, SoftBank) that Unicode was standardizing, which meant the original human emoji library was entirely binary and entirely gendered.

Most platforms draw 👦 with a short haircut, rounded cheeks, and a neutral or mildly smiling expression. It's the implicit younger sibling of 👨 and the male counterpart to 👧. Apple's current design uses short dark hair and ruddy cheeks; Google draws a bowl cut; Samsung leans toward a longer crop. The "boy" identity is carried mostly by the hair length, since the faces themselves are close to identical across the age emojis.

For seven years, 👦 and 👧 were the only kid options. That changed when Paul Hunt's L2/16-317 proposal added 🧒 Child in Emoji 5.0 (2017). 👦 didn't get replaced, but it stopped being the default. When Apple shipped iOS 13.2 in October 2019 and redrew 265 designs to use gender-neutral figures, 👦 became the explicitly-male choice in a three-way selector: boy, child, or girl.

The emoji is used most heavily by parents talking about sons, by teachers labeling kid-focused content, and as an ironic "stop being a child" callout when someone acts immature. Supports all five Fitzpatrick skin-tone modifiers (👦🏻 👦🏼 👦🏽 👦🏾 👦🏿).

Parent accounts use 👦 as shorthand for "my son." "Dropped the 👦 at practice," "the 👦 turned 7 today," "movie night with the 👦." Boy-mom content is one of the biggest single use cases, and the #BoyMom hashtag pairs it with 💙 or ⚽ constantly. Dad accounts use it similarly but tend toward action captions: "the 👦 and I at the park," "raising my 👦 right."

In school and youth-sports posts, 👦 marks content explicitly about boys' teams, boys' classes, or boys-only activities. Little League, boys' choir, cub scouts, and boys' shelters all use it as a category tag. It's more literal than decorative, which is why it reads as informational rather than playful in those contexts.

The "immaturity" lane is smaller but real. "Don't be such a 👦 about this," "grown men acting like a 👦," "men are just tall 👦s" all show up in ragebait and relationship content, usually with 🙄 or 😤. It overlaps with calling someone a 🧒, but 👦 is more pointedly about gendered immaturity: the "boys will be boys" dynamic specifically, not children generally.

In ZWJ family sequences, 👦 is a building block for dozens of configurations: 👨‍👦 (father and son), 👩‍👦 (mother and son), 👨‍👩‍👦 (family with a boy), 👨‍👨‍👦‍👦 (two dads, two boys). Apple's iOS 13.2 redesign didn't strip gender from these sequences, so they still carry the same boy-coded figure the standalone 👦 does.

Infancy

Childhood (roughly 2-10)

Adulthood

Elderhood

👦 isn't flirty. It's a literal or teasing emoji, not a romantic one. If someone you're dating sends you 👦 in a flirtatious message, they're almost certainly calling you immature, not cute. The rare exception is parents signaling they have a son in a dating bio.

• •In a dating-app bio: they're telling you they have a son, not flirting.
• •"You're such a 👦" from a partner: teasing about immaturity, not affection.
• •"The 👦s are out tonight" from a friend: just means "us guys are going out."
• •👦 with 💙 from a parent: pride in their son. Not for you.
• •Actually flirty uses are almost zero. If you're confused, assume it's literal or sarcastic.

👦 wasn't designed. It was inherited. When Unicode standardized emoji in 2010, the reference set came from the Japanese carrier charts — DoCoMo, KDDI, and SoftBank — which had been shipping pictographs since the late 1990s. The boy glyph that became U+1F466 was one of those legacy designs, drawn in the Japanese tradition of simple, round-faced children from manga and schoolbook illustrations.

The four-age model (baby, boy, man, old man) mapped neatly to how Japanese emoji had always organized people. Each age had a male and female version, and there was no neutral option. Unicode 6.0 accepted this structure wholesale. For the next seven years, if you wanted to say "a child," you had to pick 👦 or 👧 — there was no third choice.

Paul Hunt's 2016 proposal didn't set out to replace 👦. It set out to add an option. Hunt, an Adobe typeface designer on Unicode's Emoji Subcommittee, argued for a neutral adult and a neutral child so the gender-binary wasn't forced on users who didn't want it. 🧒 Child shipped in Emoji 5.0 (2017) alongside 🧑 and 🧓. 👦 kept its codepoint and meaning, but its social role changed: from "the" child emoji to "the boy" child emoji.

The second reshaping came in Apple's iOS 13.2 release in October 2019. Apple redrew 265 designs to use 🧑 or 🧒 where they had previously used 👨 or 👦 as defaults. Vampire, cook, student, zombie, and dozens more lost their implicit maleness. The iOS emoji keyboard now shows a three-way selector for people emojis: woman, person, or man. 👦 is still there, still gendered, still used — but it's a deliberate choice now, not the only option.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (October 2010) as U+1F466U+1F466 BOY. Part of the foundational 722-emoji set that Unicode standardized from the Japanese carrier libraries. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015 when the modern emoji version scheme began. Skin-tone modifiers were added in Emoji 2.0 (2015).

1. 2010👦 approved in Unicode 6.0 as U+1F466 BOY, inherited from Japanese carrier sets↗
2. 2015Emoji 2.0 ships Fitzpatrick skin-tone modifiers for 👦 and other human emojis↗
3. 2016Paul Hunt submits L2/16-317 proposing gender-neutral alternatives (would become 🧒)↗
4. 2017🧒 Child ships in Emoji 5.0 as the gender-neutral sibling of 👦/👧↗
5. 2019iOS 13.2 redraws 265 designs; 👦 stops being the default child figure in ZWJ compositions↗

👦 lands hardest in English-speaking family and parenting content, where the "boy mom" and "girl mom" split is a common identity marker. In the US and UK, 👦💙 and 👧💗 are almost clichéd parent-account openers.

In Japan, where emoji were born, 👦 overlaps with 🎏 (the carp streamer flown on Boys' Day, May 5) and 👘-style traditional imagery. Japanese-language users tend to pair 👦 with seasonal and festival emojis more than English speakers do.

In countries where language is more heavily gendered (Spanish, Arabic, Russian), 👦 is preferred over 🧒 because the surrounding text already genders the child. English's flexibility makes the 🧒 fallback more useful than it is in those languages.

In some Korean and Chinese parenting contexts, 👦 carries connotations of traditional expectations around sons — achievement, education, family continuity. The emoji is used in more formal contexts than the casual "my boy" lane common in US content.

• •👦 is one of the four original age emojis from the Unicode 6.0 (2010) set: 👶 👦 👨 👴. The gendered pairing with 👧 👩 👵 gave us eight age-gender combinations before any neutral option existed.
• •Paul Hunt's L2/16-317 didn't propose removing 👦. It proposed adding 🧒 so users could opt out of gendering kids. 👦 kept its codepoint and still ships on every major platform.
• •Apple's iOS 13.2 in October 2019 changed how 👦 shows up in the system keyboard: it became one of three options (woman, person, man) rather than the default alongside 👧.
• •👦 is a building block in dozens of family ZWJ sequences, from 👨‍👦 (man and boy) to 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 (family with two boys). These ship as single glyphs but are stitched from individual codepoints joined with U+200D.
• •The original Japanese carrier sets that 👦 came from drew him with typical manga-style rounded features. Apple's redraw in iOS 13.2 kept the base structure but softened him further toward the 🧒 design to unify the child-family visual language.
• •In Japanese culture, 👦 has a sibling holiday: 🎏 Koinobori, the carp streamers flown on May 5 for Boys' Day. Emoji borrowed both pictographs from the same school-textbook illustration tradition.
• •👦's CLDR short name is "boy," but its short codes vary: GitHub uses :boy::boy:, Slack uses :boy::boy:, Discord uses :boy::boy:. The colon syntax has been consistent across chat platforms for over a decade.

• •👦 isn't a baby. For newborns, use 👶. 👦 covers roughly 2-10 years old, the "walks, talks, still a kid" age.
• •👦 isn't "the" child emoji anymore. Since Emoji 5.0 in 2017, 🧒 is the gender-neutral default. Using 👦 specifies male.
• •👦 in a dating bio doesn't usually mean the sender is a boy. It means they have a son. Read the context.
• •👦 isn't a replacement for 🧑 in adult contexts, even for someone young. The emoji is explicitly child-aged; using it for a young adult reads as diminishing.

• •Boy-mom culture on Instagram runs on 👦💙. The hashtag #BoyMom has tens of millions of posts, and the emoji is the recognizable shorthand for the subculture.
• •Apple's iOS 13.2 release in October 2019 was the first time a major platform publicly reorganized its human emoji keyboard to offer the three-way boy/child/girl selector, essentially admitting 👦 had been overused as a default.
• •Japanese Kodomo no Hi / Boys' Day on May 5 is the origin of several Japan-specific emoji, including 🎏 and 🎎, and 👦 shows up alongside them in Japanese holiday posts.

• •Codepoint U+1F466U+1F466. Skin-tone modifiers U+1F466 U+1F3FBU+1F466 U+1F3FB through U+1F466 U+1F3FFU+1F466 U+1F3FF.
• •Shortcodes: :boy::boy: (GitHub, Slack, Discord). CLDR slug: boyboy.
• •Used as a base in dozens of family ZWJ sequences. Examples: 👨‍👦 = U+1F468 U+200D U+1F466U+1F468 U+200D U+1F466; 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 = U+1F468 U+200D U+1F469 U+200D U+1F466 U+200D U+1F466U+1F468 U+200D U+1F469 U+200D U+1F466 U+200D U+1F466.
• •Apple's iOS 13.2 (2019) changed default sequences to prefer 🧒 (U+1F9D2) and 🧑 (U+1F9D1) over 👦/👧 in many gender-ambiguous contexts.
• •Part of the original Unicode 6.0 block (2010) sourced from Japanese carrier sets.

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