Crown Emoji

A gold crown studded with jewels, the classic fairytale king-and-queen crown. 👑 is used literally for royalty and royal imagery, but that accounts for maybe 5% of actual usage. The real engine behind this emoji is stan culture and hype language. "Slay queen 👑" and "king 👑" are the dominant patterns: awarding a crown to someone who just did something impressive, confident, or funny.

Emojipedia describes 👑 as "a crown, usually depicted in gold, signifying royalty or achievement." The achievement half of that definition does most of the work. On TikTok, X, and Instagram, dropping 👑 on someone's post is the digital equivalent of crowning them, it's both sincere and meme-able at the same time.

The emoji also appears in bios and display names to signal confidence, self-worth, or affiliation with royalty-themed aesthetics. Drag and LGBTQ+ culture uses 👑 to refer to a "queen" (slang for a drag performer or a gay person), a lineage that reaches back to Harlem ballroom scenes in the 1970s and 80s long before the emoji existed.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) at codepoint U+1F451U+1F451. The character arrived through L2/07-257, the August 2007 Google proposal authored by Kat Momoi, Mark Davis, and Markus Scherer that seeded the first batch of pictographs into the Unicode standard. That's the same document that brought us 💯, 🔥, and 608 other characters. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015.

👑 is a compliment engine. It has three dominant patterns.

"Slay queen 👑" / "yass queen 👑". The most common usage on Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram. A crown is dropped on someone who just did something impressive, confident, or authentically themselves. This pattern came out of Black queer culture and drag, crossed into mainstream stan Twitter around 2014-2016, and became default internet compliment language by 2018.

"You dropped this 👑" meme. A reply format where the crown is figuratively returned to someone who's being praised. "You dropped this 👑" = acknowledging someone's greatness after they delivered a strong take or achievement. Know Your Meme traces this back to roughly 2019.

Bio decoration and self-coronation. 👑 in a display name or bio signals confidence, hustle culture, or royalty-themed aesthetics. Common on sports Twitter, LeBron James stan accounts (King James), and chess Twitter (where Magnus Carlsen is sometimes literally crowned, even after he voluntarily relinquished his World Championship title in July 2022, the first player to do so since Fischer).

Competitive flex. "Still the 👑" after winning an argument, game, or competition.

And yes, it's also still used for literal royalty, King Charles, Queen Elizabeth, Princess Diana anniversaries, but literal usage is a minority of total posts.

The crown emoji is a Google-era character. It was proposed as part of L2/07-257, the 65-page August 2007 Google submission to the Unicode Technical Committee. Authors Kat Momoi, Mark Davis, and Markus Scherer were working to get Gmail's Japanese carrier emoji set (originally built for interoperability with DoCoMo, KDDI, and SoftBank) into the Unicode standard, so that pictographs would stop being vendor-specific glyph hacks. That proposal seeded 608 characters. 👑 was one of them, approved three years later in Unicode 6.0 (October 2010) at codepoint U+1F451.

The design lineage goes back further. The Japanese carriers had drawn a crown glyph since at least the early 2000s, copying the European heraldic "king's crown" shape (arches, cross at the top, jewel-banded headband) rather than any Asian royal headwear. That's why every vendor's crown still reads as medieval fairytale: Apple, Google, Samsung, and Microsoft all ship a variant of the same St Edward's Crown silhouette.

The cultural meaning that dominates today ("slay queen," "you dropped this 👑") came from somewhere else entirely. "Slay" and "queen" as celebratory language were part of the Harlem ballroom scene in the 1970s and 80s, documented most famously in Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning (1990)), which captured the Black and Latinx queer "house" culture that would later seed modern drag vocabulary. The term migrated through RuPaul's Drag Race) in the 2010s and landed on mainstream Twitter around 2014 to 2016. The emoji just provided a single glyph for an existing linguistic gesture.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) at codepoint U+1F451U+1F451 under the CLDR name "crown." Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. The design is one of the most consistent across platforms: gold crown with three or more points and colored jewels (red, blue, or green). Apple and Google show a fleur-de-lis-style crown; Samsung's is simpler; Microsoft Fluent has the cleanest geometry.

1. 2007Google submits [L2/07-257](https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2007/07257-emoji-proposal.pdf), which includes the crown. Authors: Kat Momoi, Mark Davis, Markus Scherer.
2. 2010Unicode 6.0 ships 👑 at U+1F451. The initial Apple design has three large jewels on a gold band.
3. 2015Emoji 1.0 consolidates the crown alongside the rest of the Google-proposal set.
4. 2016[Twitter creates a custom hashflag](https://time.com/4364266/twitter-crown-emoji-queen-elizabeth-90-birthday/) for Queen Elizabeth II's 90th birthday, a one-off crown glyph that pops up next to #QueenAt90. A preview of the 2023 coronation moment.
5. 2022Unicode 14.0 ships [🫅 person with crown](/person-with-crown) (gender-neutral royalty), finally giving 👑 a human counterpart that isn't gendered. In September, Queen Elizabeth II dies and [Channel 5 in the UK airs The Emoji Movie during the funeral broadcast window](https://variety.com/2022/tv/global/channel-5-emoji-movie-queen-funeral-1235376665/), a routine scheduling choice that becomes a viral joke.
6. 2023May: [King Charles III's coronation hashflag](https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/pop-culture/2023/04/11/new-crown-emoji-revealed-ahead-of-king-charless-may-coronation/) launches on Twitter. A custom St Edward's Crown glyph triggered by #Coronation, #CoronationConcert, #CoronationWeekend, #CoronationBigLunch, and #TheBigHelpOut. The first coronation-dedicated emoji in history (every previous coronation predated the platform).
7. 2025Raw-emoji 👑 search interest hits an all-time peak value of 100 in December, up from a baseline of roughly 13. Biggest single-month spike in the emoji's 15-year history.

• •👑 shipped through L2/07-257, the same 2007 Google proposal that brought 💯 and 608 other characters into Unicode. Authors: Kat Momoi, Mark Davis, and Markus Scherer.
• •'Slay queen 👑' and 'yass queen 👑' became two of the most-used emoji phrases on Twitter by 2018. Both trace to Black queer ballroom culture, documented in Paris Is Burning (1990)) long before the emoji or the phrase went mainstream.
• •King Charles III's May 2023 coronation got the first coronation-dedicated Twitter hashflag in history. Every previous British coronation predated the internet.
• •DJ Khaled popularized 👑 in his 'major key' catchphrase era, using it in nearly every Instagram caption during 2015 to 2017.
• •👑 raw-emoji search interest hit a peak value of 100 in December 2025, then 80 in January 2026, far above the 2020 to 2024 baseline of roughly 5 to 13. The spike is the largest in the emoji's 15-year history.
• •The 'You dropped this 👑' meme emerged around 2019 and became a standard reply format. It's still used, particularly on X, as a way to acknowledge someone's strong take or achievement.
• •In chess Twitter, 👑 is applied to Magnus Carlsen, who voluntarily relinquished his World Championship title in July 2022, the first reigning world champion to do so since Bobby Fischer in 1975. The crown sticks to him in memes anyway.
• •The design is based on St Edward's Crown, the 17th-century solid-gold crown with a purple velvet cap used in British coronations. Apple, Google, Samsung, and Microsoft all ship variants of the same silhouette.
• •🫅 person with crown arrived in Unicode 14.0 (2022) as a gender-neutral counterpart. 👑 stayed dominant; 🫅 is mostly used in headlines and nonbinary-royalty art.

• •Beyoncé / Queen Bey. The fandom (the BeyHive, named by Beyoncé in a 2012 vocabulary post) uses 👑🐝 as shorthand for 'Queen Bey.' The crown substitutes for the full nickname in captions.
• •LeBron James / King James. LeBron has been 'King James' since his 2003 Sports Illustrated cover, a nickname that predates the emoji by seven years. When he passed Kareem's all-time scoring record in February 2023, 👑 trended on NBA Twitter for 48 hours.
• •Rihanna / Savage X Fenty. Savage X Fenty runway shows have used crown imagery in every staged finale since the 2018 launch. Rihanna herself gets crowned in coverage of Fenty Beauty's billion-dollar first year.
• •Magnus Carlsen. Chess Twitter still crowns Magnus after his July 2022 decision to stop defending the classical title. 'Still the 👑' is the canonical caption under his rapid and blitz wins.
• •DJ Khaled's 'major key' era. 2015 to 2017 Khaled captioned nearly every Instagram post with an emoji barrage. 👑 featured in most of them. His 2016 album Major Key) cemented the crown as a hustle-culture signifier.
• •The Crown (Netflix, 2016 to 2023). Peter Morgan's drama ran six seasons. 👑 search interest spiked in every premiere window, amplified by clustered real-world royal events (Meghan and Harry's Oprah interview, QE2's funeral, the coronation).