Dagger Emoji

A short, narrow, pointed blade. Officially encoded as DAGGER KNIFE and depicted double-edged with a cross-shaped hilt in most vendor designs. The emoji has two simultaneous lives. One is literal: a medieval sidearm, a piece of armory, a collectible. The other is metaphorical, and older than the English word 'betrayal'.

The dagger is history's assassination weapon. On 15 March 44 BC, a group of Roman senators led by Marcus Brutus stabbed Julius Caesar roughly 23 times using pugiones, short Roman daggers chosen specifically because they could be concealed under a toga. A silver coin Brutus minted afterwards shows two of those daggers next to the legend EID MAR. That image, reused for two thousand years, is why 'dagger' still reads as 'betrayal by someone close'.

Shakespeare cemented the psychological version. Macbeth's hallucinated dagger in Act II, Scene 1 ("Is this a dagger which I see before me") is the moment a troubled thought hardens into a decision. "Et tu, Brute?" from Julius Caesar (1599) is the line every 'stabbed in the back' meme traces back to, even though Shakespeare made it up.

Approved in Unicode 7.0 (2014) as U+1F5E1U+1F5E1, promoted to colour emoji in Emoji 1.0 (2015). The codepoint needs the FE0F variation selector to render in colour on most systems; without it you still get a valid black-and-white glyph.

🗡️ runs on three distinct tracks, and most usage picks exactly one.

Betrayal metaphor. "Ouch 🗡️", "stabbed in the back 🗡️", friendship-drama threads on TikTok and X. Usually paired with 🤝🗡️ (the handshake-then-stab combo) or 🗡️🫀 for heartbreak via treachery. This is the 'Brutus was my friend too' register, and it works because the image is two thousand years old.

Fantasy, RPG, BookTok. Dagger is the rogue's weapon in D&D, where it is the only standard weapon with finesse, light, thrown, and range properties at once, which is why stealth builds pick it. Assassin's Creed made the hidden-blade dagger one of the most recognisable weapons in gaming history. On BookTok, 🗡️ marks assassin-romance subplots, morally-grey-love-interest edits, and anything with a hood.

Ides of March. Every 15 March the emoji trends for one reason: a small internet tradition of quoting "Beware the Ides of March" with 🗡️. Even Emojipedia tweets the emoji on that date. Search interest shows a consistent March spike year after year.

What 🗡️ almost never means: direct violent threat. Unlike 🔪, it is stylised and medieval enough that platforms rarely moderate it, and users rarely deploy it aggressively. It reads as drama, aesthetic, or history, not as warning.

Before daggers became metaphors they were the weapon of first resort for close, personal killing. The pugio was the standard Roman legionary dagger, roughly 20-25 cm long, double-edged, carried on the belt. When Roman senators decided to remove Caesar on 15 March 44 BC, they chose pugiones because swords were conspicuous and forbidden in the Senate House. Roughly 23 stab wounds later, the dagger became the permanent Western shorthand for treason. Brutus's EID MAR denarius, minted in 42 BC, shows two daggers flanking a pileus (the hat given to freed slaves) and the legend 'Ides of March', making it possibly the first political propaganda coin in history.

Medieval Europe expanded the vocabulary. The misericorde, whose name comes from the Latin for 'mercy', was a slender dagger knights used to deliver a final blow to a defeated opponent, slipped between the plates of armour at the throat or armpit. The rondel dagger evolved in the 14th century with disc-shaped guards at pommel and crossguard, built for punching through plate armour at close range. At Agincourt (1415) English archers used rondel daggers to finish dismounted French knights, thrusting through helmet vents after arrows brought them down. This is where the 'dagger as a weapon of finishers and assassins, not of honourable open combat' reputation calcified.

The typographical dagger († at U+2020) is a separate lineage. It descends from the obelus), a mark ancient editors used in the margins of manuscripts to flag doubtful passages. The obelus evolved into a dagger-shaped glyph because the original mark was named after a roasting spit. It still marks footnotes, and it still marks death dates in obituaries, which is how a cataloguing symbol for 'suspect text' became a symbol for 'the author is no longer with us'.

The emoji arrived in 2014 via Unicode 7.0, then Emoji 1.0 in 2015, and was quickly adopted by gaming communities who had been staring at dagger icons on D&D character sheets since 1974.

1. 2014Encoded as U+1F5E1 DAGGER KNIFE in Unicode 7.0, inside the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block.
2. 2015Promoted to full-colour emoji in Emoji 1.0. First vendor designs ship on iOS, Android, Windows, and Twemoji.
3. 2016Apple's early iOS design set the mental-image standard: silver blade, gold cross-hilt, slight angle. Most later vendors converged toward this look.
4. 2018Microsoft dropped its early flat design for a more ornate cross-guard dagger in Windows 10 Creators Update, aligning with the Apple silhouette.
5. 2021Samsung One UI redesigned 🗡️ with a darker, more fantasy-styled blade and a pointed pommel, leaning into the RPG aesthetic as the emoji's dominant mode on Galaxy devices.
6. 2023Google Noto revised to a cleaner, more heraldic silhouette better suited to UI use in dense chat threads.

• •Brutus minted a coin in 42 BC, two years after the assassination, showing two daggers, a pileus cap, and the legend EID MAR. It is possibly the earliest political propaganda coin in Western history. A single EID MAR gold aureus sold at auction for £3.2 million in 2020.
• •Macbeth's floating-dagger soliloquy is the canonical stage depiction of guilt solidifying into decision. The hallucination is the exact moment the character chooses to become a killer.
• •The misericorde takes its name from the Latin misericordia, mercy. Knights used it to deliver a quick, final blow to a defeated opponent, so an instrument of killing ended up being named after compassion.
• •At Agincourt in 1415, English archers used rondel daggers to finish downed French knights by thrusting the narrow blades through helmet visors and armor gaps, a detail that later became the template for every 'stealth-takedown' animation in video games.
• •D&D 5e's dagger is the only standard weapon with finesse, light, thrown, AND range. No other weapon in the core rules carries all four properties, which is why rogues and monks default to it.
• •The Assassin's Creed Hidden Blade is modelled on the katar), a real Indian push-dagger from the medieval period. Ubisoft spent 18 years iterating on it, making it one of the most recognisable weapons in gaming.
• •The Wiccan athame is a ritual dagger that is explicitly not supposed to cut anything physical. Gerald Gardner added it to modern Wicca in the mid-20th century; it represents the fire element and masculine energy, and is used to cast ceremonial circles.
• •In Skyrim, stacking the Assassin's Blade perk (15x dagger sneak-attack) with Shrouded Gloves (double backstab damage) gives you a 30x multiplier on stealth strikes, enough to one-shot dragons.
• •The typographical dagger († U+2020) and double dagger (‡ U+2021) are used to mark footnotes when asterisks run out, but also appear in chess notation) to denote check (†) and checkmate (‡) in some European conventions.

• •Julius Caesar (Shakespeare, 1599) — "Et tu, Brute?" is the most-quoted line about betrayal in English literature. Shakespeare invented it; history has no record of Caesar actually saying it.
• •Macbeth (Shakespeare, c. 1606) — the dagger soliloquy in Act II, Scene 1 is the model for every guilty-hallucination scene since.
• •Assassin's Creed (2007-present) — the Hidden Blade, a retractable wrist-dagger modelled on the Indian katar, became one of the most recognisable weapons in video game history over the franchise's 18-year run.
• •The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011) — the Mehrunes' Razor and Blade of Woe daggers, plus the famous x30 sneak-attack multiplier with the Assassin's Blade perk, made the dagger the weapon of choice for stealth players.
• •Game of Thrones (2011-2019) — Arya's Valyrian-steel dagger is the weapon that ends the Night King. The moment single-handedly re-sold 'dagger as the hero's tool, not the villain's'.
• •The Hunger Games — Clove and her thrown knives. Katniss's arrows get the posters, but the dagger work is the genre's most-referenced close-quarters violence.