Cloud With Rain Emoji

Blue raindrops falling from a white or grey cloud. 🌧️ is both a weather report and an emotional state. Literally, it means rain. Figuratively, it means sadness, gloom, or having your plans ruined.

Approved in Unicode 7.0 (June 2014) as U+1F327U+1F327 CLOUD WITH RAIN and standardised across vendors in Emoji 1.0 (2015). It requires the FE0FFE0F variation selector to render as an emoji instead of as plain text, which is why older systems sometimes show it in black and white.

Rain is one of humanity's oldest emotional metaphors. Every culture connects rain with melancholy, tears, cleansing, and renewal. "Rain on my parade" means someone spoiled your plans (coined by Barbra Streisand in 1964's Funny Girl). "After the rain comes the sun" means things will improve. 🌧️ carries all of these associations at once.

But the internet also birthed a positive rain culture. Rain ASMR is one of the biggest ambient content categories on YouTube and TikTok, with channels generating millions of views from 8-10 hour rain sound videos designed for sleep and relaxation. The "rainy day aesthetic" (warm drinks, blankets, books, window views, candles) is a legitimate lifestyle genre with its own playlists and content economy. 🌧️ is its emoji.

The twist of 🌧️ is that it flips. Same pixels, opposite moods: depression or comfort, weather-ruined-my-plans or weather-is-perfect-for-staying-in. The context decides which.

Sadness and gloom. "Feeling 🌧️ today" is a gentle way to say you're down. The emoji softens the expression compared to explicitly saying "I'm sad." It's weather as emotional shorthand, and it reads as less dramatic than 😭 or 💔.

Weather reporting. Literal weather: "Rainy day 🌧️" or "bring an umbrella 🌧️." The most straightforward use, and the dominant one in news and weather apps.

Cosy rain aesthetic. The rainy-day aesthetic is huge on Instagram and TikTok: warm lighting, a book, a hot drink, rain on the window. 🌧️📖☕ is the visual formula, and creator accounts built on it have hundreds of thousands of followers.

Rain ASMR. Rain sounds for sleep and relaxation are one of YouTube's most popular ambient categories. Channels like "ASMR Rain Sounds for Sleeping" and "Relaxing White Noise" generate millions of views from 8-10 hour rain videos. 🌧️ is the emoji for this entire relaxation genre.

Plans cancelled. "Concert got rained out 🌧️" or "beach day cancelled 🌧️" uses rain literally as a plan-wrecker. Live event organisers live in fear of the 🌧️ forecast icon.

Monsoon coverage. In South Asia, the annual monsoon (June-September) drives the biggest regional spike in 🌧️ usage anywhere in the world. First-rain content (पहली बारिश) is a celebrated cultural moment.

U+1F327U+1F327 CLOUD WITH RAIN was approved in Unicode 7.0 (June 2014) as part of a large batch of weather conditions filling in the gaps between the original weather emoji (☀️ ☁️ ⛅) from Unicode 1.1 and the carrier-inherited 🌊 from Unicode 6.0. The 2014 batch (🌤️ 🌥️ 🌦️ 🌧️ 🌨️ 🌩️ 🌪️ 🌫️ 🌬️) turned the Unicode weather set into something that could cover an actual forecast.

The design inherits from Japanese weather-forecast pictograms, which have used a grey cloud with hatched blue drops for rainy conditions on TV and in newspapers since at least the 1950s. Western weather apps (Apple Weather, Google Weather, The Weather Channel) adopted variations of this icon in the 1990s and 2000s, which is why 🌧️ reads as a weather-app icon even outside an emoji context.

🌧️ needs the FE0F variation selector to render as an emoji. Without it, older systems show a black-and-white pictograph. This is why some weather-automation tweets (bot-authored) occasionally break: they emit U+1F327U+1F327 without the selector and end up posting a text symbol instead of the full-colour icon.

1. 2014U+1F327 CLOUD WITH RAIN approved in Unicode 7.0 as part of the big weather-conditions batch.↗
2. 2015Emoji 1.0 standardises weather emojis across vendors. Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft converge on the grey-cloud / blue-drops design.↗
3. 2018TikTok's rise accelerates rain ASMR and cosy-rain aesthetic content. 🌧️ usage begins shifting from primarily "sad" to "cosy" in Gen Z usage.
4. 2022The rainy-day aesthetic becomes a TikTok genre of its own (#rainyday, #cozyvibes). Single 8-10 hour rain videos on YouTube start regularly pulling 10M+ views.
5. 2024Microsoft 3D Fluent redesign gives 🌧️ a more photorealistic cloud with volumetric drops, notable shift from the flatter 2015-era designs.

• •Rain ASMR is one of YouTube's most popular ambient content categories. Channels like "Relaxing White Noise" and "ASMR Rain Sounds for Sleeping" generate millions of views from multi-hour rain recordings designed for sleep.
• •"Don't rain on my parade" comes from the 1964 musical Funny Girl, sung by Barbra Streisand. The song turned "raining on someone's parade" into a universal idiom for spoiling someone's happiness.
• •Petrichor, the pleasant earthy smell after rain, is caused by bacteria in soil releasing a chemical called geosmin. The word was coined in 1964 by Australian scientists Isabel Bear and Dick Thomas in a Nature paper.
• •Humans can detect geosmin at concentrations as low as 0.4 parts per billion, which is one of the most sensitive chemical detections in human olfaction. Some scientists think this sensitivity evolved because our ancestors needed to find water.
• •India's monsoon (मानसून) arrives in Kerala each year around June 1st and moves north across the subcontinent. The Indian Meteorological Department tracks it in real time; the "monsoon onset" is one of the most closely watched weather events on Indian social media.
• •The FE0F variation selector is why 🌧️ sometimes breaks: older systems or poorly-coded bots emit U+1F327U+1F327 alone and render it as a plain text symbol instead of the full-colour emoji. The selector makes the difference between ☁️ and cloud-symbol-in-your-system-font.
• •East Asia's tsuyu (梅雨, "plum rain") is a distinct rainy season from June to mid-July, named because it coincides with plum ripening. Japanese and Korean weather apps use a 🌧️-style icon heavily during tsuyu forecasts.

• •🌧️ is U+1F327U+1F327 + U+FE0FU+FE0F. Common shortcodes: :cloud_rain::cloud_rain: (Slack), :cloud_with_rain::cloud_with_rain: (Discord, GitHub).
• •Always include the FE0F variation selector when emitting the emoji programmatically. Without it, older systems render a plain text symbol rather than the coloured emoji.

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