Cat Emoji

🐈 is a full-body cat, almost always drawn in profile, standing or walking. Emojipedia catalogs it as "Cat", a plain reference to the animal itself rather than any specific mood. On Apple and Google it renders as a pale orange tabby. Samsung, Microsoft, and WhatsApp lean gray or multicolored. It's the wide-shot version of a cat, as opposed to 🐱 cat face, which only shows the head.

In chats the full body is the one you use when the cat needs context: next to a fish, inside a box, curled up on a laptop. The face emoji does better for reactions and vibes; 🐈 does better for scenes. That distinction shows up in Emojipedia's cat glossary and in how the two render alongside each other in captions.

It sits inside the broader internet cat economy. Wikipedia's "Cats and the Internet" entry describes cats as the "unofficial mascot of the Internet," and a big reason the cat emoji set is so bloated (nine face variants plus two full-body variants) is that Unicode inherited Japanese carrier emoji sets in 2010 where cats were already overrepresented. 🐈 is the most animal-y of the bunch: no smile, no hearts, just a cat being a cat.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (October 2010) as U+1F408U+1F408 CAT, then promoted to emoji 1.0 in 2015.

🐈 lives in pet content: adoption posts, vet visits, "my cat did this" reactions, rescue accounts, and Caturday throwbacks. The full body is chosen when the actual shape of the cat matters. A cat loafing, a cat perched on a shelf, a cat pretending it didn't just knock the glass off the counter: all 🐈 moments.

It's less common than 🐱 in casual DMs because faces are cuter at small sizes. But it dominates in long-form captions, animal welfare accounts, and anything meme-adjacent that calls back to the LOLcat era. Phrases like "if I fits, I sits" and "box = cat" read naturally with 🐈 because the body is the joke. Twitter/X users use it in bios next to 🐕 or 🐾 to signal "I have pets" without the face-level cuteness signal.

On TikTok it often shows up in the description of pet creator videos where the cat is the main character. The "Chipi Chipi Chapa Chapa" trend that exploded in December 2023 and never really died made full-body cat clips part of the default feed, and captions like "me when 🐈" rode that wave.

One other usage that's quietly grown: pet insurance, vet, and shelter accounts pair 🐈 with 🏠 or ❤️ in adoption posts because the full body reads more like "this specific animal" than the more abstract 🐱 face.

The cat emoji set traces back to 2003, when Japanese mobile carrier au by KDDI added cat faces to their proprietary emoji set. That early set was culturally front-loaded with cats because Japan's own relationship with the animal, through the maneki-neko tradition dating back to the Edo period, through cat cafes, and through famous cat islands like Aoshima and Tashirojima, made felines essential for users.

When Apple engineers Yasuo Kida and Peter Edberg submitted the original emoji proposal to Unicode in 2009, the cat-heavy Japanese carrier set came along for the ride. Unicode 6.0 in October 2010 standardized the whole thing. The full-body 🐈 arrived alongside the 9 cat face emoji that had existed in Japan for years.

The species itself is much older in the cultural record. Cats were domesticated roughly 10,000 years ago in the Near East, drawn to the first agricultural settlements because they were full of rodents. Newer DNA evidence from 2025 revised this story: the modern housecat lineage seems to have originated in North Africa and only reached Europe around 2,000 years ago. Cats have been worshipped (ancient Egypt, the goddess Bastet), vilified (medieval Europe, associated with witches), and posted online endlessly (the internet, all of it).

• •There are roughly 373 million pet cats worldwide, plus around 100 million wild cats (including lions and tigers). Dogs edge cats in pet population (471 million) but cats dominate the internet anyway.
• •Cats and tigers share about 95.6% of their DNA. Your 10-pound housecat is essentially a tiger that decided agriculture was a good deal.
• •The BLACK CAT emoji was requested over 20,000 times on EmojiRequest.com before Unicode approved it in 2020. It was the first color variation ever added to an animal emoji.
• •Japan's au by KDDI added cat face emojis to their proprietary set in 2003, three years before SoftBank and seven years before Unicode 6.0. Cats were among the first emojis ever designed.
• •The Grumpy Cat meme empire reportedly generated over $100 million in merchandise revenue during Tardar Sauce's lifetime, including a Lifetime Christmas movie.
• •In Nyan Cat's 2021 NFT sale, the original GIF sold for about 300 ETH (~$600,000 at the time). It's one of the most expensive cat images in history.
• •Russia has the world's highest household cat ownership rate at 59%. Nearly six out of ten Russian homes have a cat.
• •Pope Gregory IX's 1233 papal bull Vox in Rama is often blamed for the medieval European panic about cats being agents of the devil, which shaped the Halloween black-cat iconography that survives today.
• •Cats sleep 12 to 16 hours a day on average. If your cat seems suspicious about how much it sleeps, it isn't, this is completely normal.

• •🐈 is U+1F408U+1F408. Unicode name: CAT. Common shortcodes: :cat2::cat2: (GitHub, Discord), :cat::cat: usually maps to 🐱 instead. Double-check which one you're using.
• •🐈‍⬛ is a ZWJ sequence: U+1F408 U+200D U+2B1BU+1F408 U+200D U+2B1B. If you're rendering emojis in a custom text pipeline, make sure your library supports ZWJ sequences or you'll see it as two separate glyphs (cat + black square).

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