Broom Emoji

A traditional broom at a 45-degree angle, with a wooden handle and yellow bristles. 🧹 covers more ground than you'd expect for a cleaning tool. It means literal sweeping and cleaning, but it's also the emoji for witches (especially around Halloween), sports "clean sweeps," clearing out negativity, and Harry Potter's Quidditch.

The broom has a surprisingly rich symbolic history. In European folklore, brooms were associated with witchcraft, with the earliest depiction of a witch on a broom dating to a late 13th-century mural in Schleswig Cathedral, Germany. In African American and Romani wedding traditions, "jumping the broom" is a ceremony symbolizing a new beginning. In pagan practice, the besom (a broom made from twigs) is used to cleanse ritual spaces of negative energy.

Online, 🧹 is popular in group chats as a moderation tool. Reacting to a message with 🧹 means "this needs to be swept away", cleaning up rule-breaking or unwanted content without engaging in discussion.

🧹 peaks twice a year: during spring cleaning season (March-April) and around Halloween (October). CleanTok creators on TikTok use it as their signature emoji alongside 🧼✨🫧. Sports fans deploy it for "clean sweep" moments, when a team wins every game in a series. In Harry Potter fan spaces, 🧹 combined with ⚡🤓 signals Quidditch content. In group chats and Discord servers, a 🧹 reaction is a quiet moderation move, meaning "clean this up" or "remove this message."

Brooms are ancient. The basic concept, bundles of twigs tied to a stick, predates recorded history. But the broom's symbolic life is where things get interesting.

The witch-broom connection runs deep. The earliest known depiction of a witch flying on a broom appears in a late 13th-century mural in Schleswig Cathedral, Germany. During the witch-hunt era (15th-17th centuries), brooms were household tools used primarily by women, which made them targets for suspicion. In pagan traditions, the besom (a broom made from twigs and branches) is used to sweep away negative energy before rituals, a practice that continues today.

"Jumping the broom" is a wedding tradition with multiple origins. Among African Americans, it was practiced during the era of slavery when legal marriage was forbidden, and was repopularized in the 1970s by the novel and miniseries Roots. But the tradition also has roots among England's Romani communities, where couples in Wales would elope by jumping over a branch of flowering broom. Celtic traditions also feature besom weddings, where the couple jumps over a broom to symbolize sweeping away the old and welcoming the new.

The emoji 🧹 was approved in Unicode 11.0 (2018) as U+1F9F9, part of the "household" subcategory of objects.

• •The earliest depiction of a witch flying on a broom is a late 13th-century mural in Schleswig Cathedral, Germany, showing the goddess Frigga riding one.
• •"Jumping the broom" has roots in both African American and Romani wedding traditions. In Wales, Romani couples would elope by jumping over a branch of flowering broom.
• •In pagan practice, the besom (twig broom) is used to sweep away negative energy from ritual spaces. It's held a few inches above the floor so it cleanses energy rather than actual dirt.
• •The broom emoji 🧹 is used in group chats as a moderation tool. Reacting with 🧹 signals "this should be removed" without engaging in argument.
• •In sports, a "clean sweep" (winning every game in a series) is one of the most satisfying results. Teams and fans use 🧹 to celebrate sweep victories.
• •Harry Potter made broomsticks cool for a generation. The Nimbus 2000 and Firebolt are among fiction's most famous transportation devices. Fans use 🧹⚡ as Quidditch shorthand.
• •In Japanese osoji tradition, the entire house is swept clean before New Year's to purify the space and welcome fresh energy for the coming year.
• •The #CleanTok hashtag on TikTok has pulled over 70 billion views, and is one of the largest content verticals on the platform. 🧹 is one of its signature emojis.
• •The February 2020 Broom Challenge, based on a false claim attributed to NASA, got 60 million TikTok views and 217,000 likes on the original tweet in a single day before being debunked.

• •Harry Potter: Nimbus 2000 and Firebolt. Harry's Nimbus 2000 arrives in book one as a gift from Professor McGonagall after he makes the Gryffindor Quidditch team, becoming one of fiction's most famous transportation devices. The Firebolt, a Christmas gift from Sirius Black in Prisoner of Azkaban, was the highest-selling racing broom in the wizarding world within 12 months of release. 🧹⚡ is still standard Harry Potter shorthand.
• •The Wizard of Oz (1939). The Wicked Witch of the West's broomstick is the film's MacGuffin. Dorothy's mission is literally to bring back the witch's broom. Eighty-plus years later, any 🧹 with a green tint or a cackle reference still evokes the scene.
• •Jumping the Broom (2011 film). The Salim Akil film starring Angela Bassett and Loretta Devine dramatized the African American wedding tradition and cemented 🧹👰 as shorthand for Black wedding content online.
• •CleanTok. The #CleanTok hashtag has pulled in over 70 billion views on TikTok. Creators like Mrs. Hinch and Vanesa Amaro made domestic cleaning into a genre, with 🧹🧽🫧 as their signature emoji trio.