Face With Symbols On Mouth Emoji

An angry red face with a black censorship bar across the mouth, covered in typographical symbols like @#$%&!. The face is swearing. You can't see the words, but you know exactly what they are.

Those symbols have a name: grawlixes. Coined by Beetle Bailey creator Mort Walker in 1964 and formalized in his 1980 book *The Lexicon of Comicana*, grawlixes are the comic strip convention of replacing profanity with unpronounceable keyboard characters. But the practice itself is much older. The earliest known use of symbols-for-swearing appears in Rudolph Dirks' *The Katzenjammer Kids* on December 14, 1902. When Unicode added 🤬 in 2017, they digitized a visual language that had been running for 115 years.

Emojipedia describes it as "an angry-red face with a black bar and white grawlixes covering its mouth, indicating it's swearing or being vulgar." It sits at the top of the anger emoji spectrum: 😤 huffs, 😠 frowns, 😡 turns red, and 🤬 starts saying things that can't be printed. It's the only standard emoji that explicitly represents profanity.

In texting, 🤬 is the emoji of last resort. You don't start with the swearing face. You escalate to it. "They cancelled my flight" gets 😠. "They cancelled my flight, lost my luggage, and the rebooking queue is 4 hours" gets 🤬. The censorship bar is what makes it work: it implies worse language than any actual swear word could deliver, because the reader's imagination fills in something worse than what you'd have typed.

Gen Z swears more than any other generation, nearly three times as often as Baby Boomers per day, but their relationship with 🤬 is complicated. Because Gen Z uses 74% of emojis differently from their intended meanings, 🤬 often gets deployed for comedic exaggeration rather than real fury. "My alarm didn't go off 🤬" is a joke. "They charged me twice 🤬🤬🤬" might be real.

On social media, 🤬 thrives in sports reactions, gaming rage, and political commentary. It's popular in comment sections where people want to express strong feelings without actually typing profanity (which platforms may flag or filter). The emoji lets you swear without technically swearing, which is exactly the same function grawlixes served in newspapers that couldn't print profanity.

At work, 🤬 is an absolute no. It's the most obviously inappropriate emoji for professional settings. Even in the most casual Slack channel, a swearing face reads as a loss of composure. The Adaptavist Group lists anger and negative emojis among those to avoid in professional communication.

The story of 🤬 starts 115 years before the emoji existed, in a newspaper comic strip.

On December 14, 1902, Rudolph Dirks' The Katzenjammer Kids used typographical symbols to replace swear words in a speech bubble. Dirks, a 20-year-old German immigrant cartoonist, is credited with pioneering both the modern speech bubble and the visual convention of symbols-for-profanity. The idea was practical: newspapers couldn't print swear words, but readers understood that @#$%&! meant someone was cursing.

The convention spread through American comics for decades without a name. Then, in 1964, Mort Walker, creator of Beetle Bailey, wrote a satirical article called "Let's Get Down to Grawlixes" for the National Cartoonists Society. He coined the term *grawlix* for those squiggly profanity symbols, possibly from the word "growl." Walker intended it as a joke, but the term stuck. In 1980, he published *The Lexicon of Comicana*, a tongue-in-cheek dictionary of comic strip visual conventions. Alongside grawlixes, he named plewds (sweat drops flying off a character), briffits (dust clouds from rapid movement), and squeans (stars circling a dazed head). Most of his other terms stayed obscure. Grawlix went mainstream.

Fast forward to 2016. Unicode's proposal document L2/16-313 included a "Serious Face with Symbols Covering Mouth" among proposed new emoji faces. The proposal noted annotations for "swearing," "cuss," and "curse." It was approved in Unicode 10.0 in June 2017 as U+1F92CU+1F92C. The grawlix, a visual shorthand invented in 1902 newspaper comics, had finally become a Unicode character. One hundred and fifteen years from The Katzenjammer Kids to your phone keyboard.

Approved in Unicode 10.0 (June 2017) as U+1F92CU+1F92C. Added to Emoji 5.0 in 2017. The original Unicode name was "Serious Face with Symbols Covering Mouth," which was later simplified to "Face with Symbols on Mouth" for the CLDR short name.

The emoji was proposed in document L2/16-313, an "Emoji Faces Proposal for Unicode v10" that included annotations for "swearing," "cuss," and "curse." It was one of several new face emojis added in Unicode 10.0, alongside 🤩 (star-struck), 🥴 (woozy face), and 🥵 (hot face).

The emoji arrived relatively late in the emoji timeline. Most core face emojis came from Unicode 6.0 (2010) via Japanese carrier sets. 🤬 had no Japanese carrier precedent. It was a new addition, proposed because no existing emoji explicitly represented swearing, and the grawlix convention was universal enough to be understood without explanation.

1. 1902Rudolph Dirks' The Katzenjammer Kids uses typographical symbols for swearing, the earliest known grawlix↗
2. 1964Mort Walker coins the term "grawlix" in an article for the National Cartoonists Society↗
3. 1980Walker publishes The Lexicon of Comicana, formalizing grawlix and other comic strip visual vocabulary↗
4. 2016Unicode proposal L2/16-313 includes "Serious Face with Symbols Covering Mouth"↗
5. 2017Approved in Unicode 10.0 as U+1F92C, added to Emoji 5.0↗

• 🎬
  TikTok: profanity demoted, 🤬 fine: Per [Bleepify's 2026 platform breakdown](https://bleepify.me/blog/can-you-swear-on-youtube-tiktok-instagram-twitch-platform-rules-2026/), audible and captioned profanity gets pushed off the For You Page. Auto-captions surface the words you said even when the audio is muted. 🤬 in a comment or caption is a face emoji, not a flagged token.
• 📷
  Instagram: profanity reels deboosted, 🤬 fine: Reels containing profanity are filtered from Explore surfaces. The 🤬 emoji isn't on Instagram's inappropriate-emoji list; it reads as anger expression rather than profanity in their classifiers.
• 📺
  YouTube: profanity demonetized, 🤬 fine: YouTube's advertiser-friendly guidelines demonetize videos with strong language in the first 8 seconds. Comment 🤬 has no equivalent demonetization signal; the strike system is built around words and audio, not glyph rage.
• 💼
  Slack and Teams: both flagged for HR: Workplace surveillance treats 🤬 as documented anger. The [NLRB has ruled workplace profanity can be protected speech](https://www.uschamber.com/employment-law/unions/national-labor-relations-board-says-profanity-in-the-workplace-is-just-fine), but the emoji and the word both end up in discovery during a dispute. The grawlix bar is plausible deniability everywhere except work.
• 🐦
  X: no filter on either: X moved away from automated profanity filters in 2023. The platform now downranks reach for slurs and CSAM markers, not casual swearing. 🤬 and the words it stands in for both ride freely.
• 🎮
  Discord AutoMod: configurable per server: [Discord AutoMod](https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4421269296535-AutoMod-FAQ) lets server owners block emoji and characters by custom keyword rule. Some gaming servers explicitly ban 🤬 in family channels; most leave it open because the censor bar is the joke.

• •The symbols on 🤬's mouth are called grawlixes, coined by Beetle Bailey creator Mort Walker in 1964. The word may come from "growl." Walker published a full dictionary of comic strip visual conventions in his 1980 book *The Lexicon of Comicana*, which also coined "plewds" (sweat drops) and "briffits" (dust clouds).
• •The earliest known symbols-for-swearing in comics appeared in *The Katzenjammer Kids* on December 14, 1902, created by 20-year-old German immigrant Rudolph Dirks. Dirks is also credited with pioneering the modern speech bubble. The 🤬 emoji digitized a convention that ran for 115 years before reaching your phone.
• •The Unicode proposal L2/16-313 originally named this emoji "Serious Face with Symbols Covering Mouth." Calling a bright red swearing face "serious" is like calling a wildfire "warm."
• •Gen Z swears nearly three times as often as Baby Boomers per day. But they use 🤬 more for comedic exaggeration than actual anger, consistent with their broader pattern of using emojis ironically.
• •🤬 is one of the newest face emojis, arriving in Unicode 10.0 (2017). Most core face emojis came from Unicode 6.0 (2010) via Japanese carrier sets. 🤬 had no Japanese carrier precedent because Japanese text culture had kaomoji for anger but no grawlix equivalent. The censorship-bar concept is distinctly Western, rooted in American newspaper comics.
• •The specific symbols shown in the grawlix vary by platform. Apple shows @#$%, Google shows #@!, Samsung shows !@#. The symbols are deliberately "unpronounceable," using characters that can't form a word: @, #, $, %, &, !. This makes them universal: you can't accidentally spell an actual swear word with them.

• •The biggest risk: 🤬 used for comedy ("my wifi is so slow 🤬") gets read as genuine rage by someone who takes emojis literally. Generational differences matter here. A boomer or Gen X recipient may think you're actually swearing at them.
• •In professional settings, 🤬 can create documentation problems. Workplace communication is often discoverable in legal proceedings. An angry emoji in Slack could appear in a harassment complaint even if the intent was humorous.
• •The grawlix convention works because the reader fills in the profanity. But different readers fill in different words. What you imagined as a mild "damn" might register as something much stronger to the recipient.

• •🤬 uses grawlix (the comic convention of @#$%! symbols for profanity, coined by cartoonist Mort Walker). The emoji imports a technique from print comics into digital communication.
• •Apple's 🤬 shows "@#$%&!" across the mouth. Google shows different symbols. The specific grawlix characters vary by platform, meaning the "swear words" look different depending on who's reading.

• •Codepoint: U+1F92CU+1F92C. Unicode name: FACE WITH SYMBOLS ON MOUTH. Original proposal name: "Serious Face with Symbols Covering Mouth."
• •Shortcodes: :face_with_symbols_on_mouth::face_with_symbols_on_mouth: or :symbols_over_mouth::symbols_over_mouth: on Slack. :cursing_face::cursing_face: on some platforms. Discord: :face_with_symbols_over_mouth::face_with_symbols_over_mouth:.
• •Added in Unicode 10.0 (2017), Emoji 5.0. Newer than most face emojis (which came from Unicode 6.0 in 2010).
• •The specific grawlix symbols vary by platform: Apple shows @#$%@#$%, Google shows #@!#@!, Samsung shows !@#!@#. If your application renders platform-specific descriptions, note this variation.
• •In content moderation systems, 🤬 may be treated as a profanity signal even though it contains no actual profanity. Consider this when building automated moderation.

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