Crescent Moon Emoji

🌙 is the crescent moon, but read it as 'night' and you'll be right nine times out of ten. It's the emoji people reach for at 11pm when they type 'goodnight,' when they describe themselves as a night owl in a bio, when they caption a photo taken after sunset, or when they post during Ramadan. The shape is a thin curve, usually gold on Apple, and always unambiguously a moon.

Formally approved as part of Unicode 6.0 in October 2010, 🌙 sits apart from the eight phase emojis (🌑🌒🌓🌔🌕🌖🌗🌘). Those are astronomical. 🌙 is emotional. Nobody posts 🌘 to say goodnight. Nobody writes 'waning gibbous energy' in their bio. 🌙 is the moon you feel, not the moon you measure.

It also carries religious weight. The crescent appears on the flags of Turkey, Pakistan, Malaysia, Tunisia, Algeria, Azerbaijan, and several other countries, and the Hilal, the young crescent sighted after sunset on the 29th day of a lunar month, marks the start of Ramadan and Eid for Muslims worldwide. When someone posts 'Ramadan Mubarak 🌙' in March or April, that's the emoji doing real cultural work.

On Apple, the moon faces right. On Google and older Samsung designs it has sometimes faced left, which astronomy pedants will tell you makes it technically a waning crescent. Emojipedia notes the design has drifted over the years: Google's was once silvery and resembled a waning shape; Samsung briefly wrapped it in a small sky of stars. The Unicode character itself is direction-agnostic. Your keyboard picks a side.

Three contexts dominate. 'Goodnight 🌙' is the universal one, including for people who never use emojis otherwise. Then there's identity use: 🌙 in an Instagram bio reads as 'I'm a night person, I'm a little mysterious, I might post about astrology.' Finally, religious use: during Ramadan, 🌙 appears in greetings, iftar posts, and community messages across every Muslim-majority platform community.

One quirk worth knowing: Instagram's Quiet Mode uses a small crescent moon icon next to a user's name when they've turned notifications off. So if you see a moon next to someone's handle, they're not ignoring you, they're on a schedule. This caused a wave of 'why did you mute me' DMs when the feature rolled out in early 2023.

🌙 skews feminine in usage, partly because of its association with astrology (the moon rules emotion in Western astrology, and in many cultures is figured as a goddess, Selene, Artemis, Diana, Chang'e). It's heavy in dark academia, witchy, and softgirl aesthetics. It's light in sports and politics. You'll see it in about four of every hundred tweets about sleep, almost none about elections.

The crescent predates the emoji by about five thousand years. The earliest known uses of the crescent moon as a symbol appear in Sumerian Mesopotamia around 3500-3000 BCE, tied to the moon god Nannar (Sin) and appearing in an astral triad with the sun god Utu and Inanna (Ishtar), who was associated with the planet Venus. The star-and-crescent combination as a single icon comes from this period.

Greek and Byzantine cultures adopted it for Hecate, a goddess the Byzantines credited with saving the city during the siege by Philip II of Macedon in 340 BCE. A sudden flash of light in the night sky, attributed to Hecate, let defenders spot the attacking army. The crescent became the city's emblem. When Constantine rebuilt the city as Constantinople in 324 CE, the crescent stayed. He reportedly added the star to represent the Virgin Mary.

Islam did not originally use the symbol. Early Islamic armies carried solid-colored banners (black, white, green). The Ottomans adopted the crescent in 1453 after conquering Constantinople and inheriting its existing emblem. Over the following centuries, as the Ottoman Empire expanded and identified as the seat of the caliphate, the crescent became visually synonymous with Islam across much of the world.

By the time Unicode approved 🌙 in 2010, the crescent was already doing several jobs at once: astronomical phase, religious symbol, flag motif, and generic shorthand for night. The emoji inherited all of them.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F319U+1F319 CRESCENT MOON. Part of the original Japanese carrier set (SoftBank, DoCoMo) that Apple inherited for the iPhone keyboard. Unicode assigned a separate code point (U+1F312U+1F312) for the astronomically precise waxing crescent, which is why 🌙 and 🌒 coexist as distinct emojis despite representing the same lunar phase.

1. 2010Unicode 6.0 approves U+1F319 CRESCENT MOON.↗
2. 2011Apple's original iOS design ships: glossy gold crescent facing right, no stars, no face.
3. 2012Apple ships iOS 6 with [Do Not Disturb](https://support.apple.com/en-us/105112), introduced by Scott Forstall at WWDC 2012. The status-bar icon is a crescent moon. It has stayed a crescent through every redesign, including the 2021 rebrand to Focus mode.
4. 2013Google's initial Noto Color design resembles a waning crescent in a pale-silver palette, later criticized for inconsistency with the Unicode description.
5. 2017Google redesigns to a cleaner right-facing golden crescent that matches Apple's orientation more closely.
6. 2019Facebook Messenger ships a [dark-mode Easter egg](https://www.xda-developers.com/facebook-messenger-dark-mode-enable-moon-emoji/): sending 🌙 in a chat triggers a shower of falling moons and unlocks the dark theme.
7. 2023Instagram launches [Quiet Mode](https://help.instagram.com/688407339404755/) using a crescent moon icon next to handles of users who have muted notifications.

• 🇹🇷
  Türkiye: predates Islam in the region: The flag's design dates to the late Ottoman era, but [Britannica](https://www.britannica.com/topic/crescent-symbol) traces the crescent's local use back to pre-Islamic Anatolia. The red stands for the blood of martyrs; the white shapes mean peace and divine guidance.
• 🇵🇰
  Pakistan: progress and knowledge: Per the constitution, the [crescent represents progress](https://www.learnreligions.com/international-flags-with-a-crescent-moon-symbol-2004484) and the star represents light, knowledge, and guidance. Adopted at independence in 1947.
• 🇩🇿
  Algeria: blood of independence: The red of the crescent and star honors the people killed fighting French rule, finalized in 1962. The crescent and star themselves are Islamic.
• 🇹🇳
  Tunisia: an Ottoman inheritance: Designed in 1835 under Ottoman influence and the oldest currently-flown crescent flag in the Muslim world after Türkiye. The red disk holding the crescent is the only flag where the crescent appears inside a sun.
• 🇲🇾
  Malaysia: royal yellow: The yellow crescent is not religious shorthand, it's the [royal color](https://www.learnreligions.com/international-flags-with-a-crescent-moon-symbol-2004484) of the Malay rulers. The 14 stripes and 14 points on the star are for the 13 states plus the federal government.
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The Moon (XVIII) in tarot

Why Ramadan moves about 11 days earlier every year

• •The crescent appears on the flags of at least 12 countries, including Turkey, Pakistan, Malaysia, Tunisia, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Mauritania, and the Maldives. More national flags feature the crescent than the cross.
• •Sending 🌙 in Facebook Messenger in 2019 literally activated dark mode. Moons would fall down the chat screen. Facebook rolled out dark mode for everyone on April 15, 2019.
• •Instagram uses 🌙 as the symbol for Quiet Mode. If you see it next to a handle, that person has notifications muted.
• •The star-and-crescent symbol existed around 2,000 years before Islam, originating in Sumerian Mesopotamia with the moon god Nannar. Early Muslim armies used plain-colored banners, not the crescent.
• •On Apple the moon faces right, but on some older Samsung and Google designs it faced left, which astronomically would make it a waning crescent. Unicode doesn't specify direction, so each vendor picks.
• •The Hilal is a young crescent moon sighted just after sunset on the 29th day of an Islamic lunar month. Its visibility marks the start of the next month. Because sightings depend on weather and location, different countries can start Ramadan a day apart.
• •In neo-pagan and Wiccan traditions, the triple moon symbol shows a waxing crescent, full moon, and waning crescent together, representing the Maiden, Mother, and Crone. 🌙 plus 🌕 plus 🌘 reads that way in witchy content.
• •A 2013 study published in Current Biology found that near a full moon, deep-sleep EEG delta activity drops 30%, melatonin decreases, and sleep duration falls about 20 minutes. It's a modest effect, but it's measurable even in labs without windows.
• •The Unicode name is CRESCENT MOON, not 'waxing crescent.' The naming predates the eight-phase emoji set added in Unicode 6.0 alongside it, which is why 🌙 and 🌒 overlap.
• •Apple's iOS 6 Do Not Disturb, demoed by Scott Forstall at WWDC 2012, picked a crescent for its status-bar indicator and never changed it. Even after the 2021 rebrand to Focus, the moon stayed.
• •The Islamic Hijri year is 354 to 355 days, about 10.88 days shorter than the Gregorian year. That's why Ramadan slides about 11 days earlier each year and cycles through every season once every 33 years.
• •Tarot card XVIII, The Moon), shows a crayfish climbing out of a pool toward two howling dogs. A.E. Waite called the card 'the life of the imagination apart from the life of the spirit', and that's the meaning the witchy 🌙🔮 combo carries to this day.
• •Singapore's flag is the only national flag where the crescent is officially secular by design intent: it stands for 'a young nation on the rise', not Islam. The five stars are democracy, peace, progress, justice, and equality.

• •🌙 is U+1F319U+1F319. UTF-8 bytes: F0 9F 8C 99F0 9F 8C 99. HTML entity: 🌙🌙.
• •Common shortcodes: :crescent_moon::crescent_moon: on Slack, Discord, GitHub, and Emojipedia.
• •Unicode name: CRESCENT MOON (unchanged since Unicode 6.0, 2010). Distinct code point from the eight astronomical phase emojis U+1F311U+1F311 to U+1F318U+1F318.
• •Direction is implementation-defined. Apple renders right-facing, Google/Samsung historically rendered left-facing. If direction matters in your UI, use 🌒 (waxing) or 🌘 (waning) instead for determinism.

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