Face With Tongue Emoji

A yellow face with small open eyes, a big grin, and a tongue sticking out. The emoji form of :P, one of the oldest emoticons in internet history. Playful, cheeky, and designed to say "just kidding" without typing it.

😛 is the baseline of the tongue-out family: 😛 (plain), 😜 (winking), 😝 (squinting), 😋 (savoring), and 🤪 (truly unhinged). Each one escalates the energy. 😛 is the calm one. The tongue is out but the face is composed. It's mischief at a low simmer.

As a gesture, sticking your tongue out carries wildly different meanings depending on where you are. In Western culture, it's teasing or rudeness (children do it to taunt). In Tibet, it's a greeting and a sign of respect. In Maori culture, it's part of the haka war dance, signifying strength and ferocity. And when Albert Einstein did it for photographer Arthur Sasse on his 72nd birthday in 1951, it became arguably the most iconic photograph of any 20th century scientist. That photo sold for $125,000 at auction in 2017.

😛 was added in Unicode 6.1 (2012) under the name "Face with Stuck-Out Tongue." Google Trends shows it at a flat 4-5, completely invisible next to 😜 which spiked to 87 in early 2023. The plainest tongue-out face is the least interesting tongue-out face.

😛 is the softener. You drop it after a mildly bold statement to signal you're not being serious. "I could eat this whole pizza by myself 😛" or "You're so slow at texting 😛" or "Maybe I'll just stay home forever 😛." The tongue-out says: don't take this literally.

Dictionary.com notes it can carry a "bit of lasciviousness," and that's true. A tongue emoji is a tongue emoji. In flirty contexts, 😛 can read as playfully suggestive. But it's milder than 😜 (which winks, adding innuendo) and much milder than 🤪 (which is chaotic). 😛 keeps one foot in innocent territory.

There's a concentration connection too. Psychology Today reports that people stick their tongues out when concentrating because the motor cortex area controlling the tongue is adjacent to the area controlling hand movements. Neural signals spill over. Kids do it while drawing. Adults do it while threading a needle. Michael Jordan famously did it mid-dunk. 😛 could theoretically mean "I'm concentrating so hard my tongue is out," but nobody actually uses it that way.

The tongue-out gesture is ancient. The Maori people of New Zealand incorporate it into the haka, a ceremonial war dance, where the extended tongue signals strength and defiance. In Tibet, sticking your tongue out is a traditional greeting and a sign of respect, reportedly dating back to the 9th century when a cruel king was said to have a black tongue, and showing your tongue proved you weren't his reincarnation.

In modern Western culture, the gesture shifted to playground rudeness: children stick their tongues out to taunt. Psychology Today notes it can be "an act of rudeness, disgust, playfulness, or outright sexual provocation" depending on context.

The digital version started with :P (tongue-out emoticon), one of the foundational text emoticons alongside :) and :(. The colon represents eyes, P represents a tongue sticking out to the side. It was already widespread on Usenet, IRC, and bulletin boards by the early 1990s.

And then there's Einstein. On March 14, 1951 (his 72nd birthday), photographer Arthur Sasse asked Einstein to smile for the camera at Princeton. Einstein, tired of smiling for photographers all day, stuck his tongue out instead. He liked the photo so much he ordered multiple prints to send to friends, writing: "This gesture you will like, because it is aimed at all of humanity. A civilian can afford to do what no diplomat would dare." The original signed photo sold for $125,000 at auction in 2017.

Approved in Unicode 6.1 (2012) as U+1F61BU+1F61B FACE WITH STUCK-OUT TONGUE. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. Later renamed via CLDR to "Face with Tongue." Arrived alongside 😜 (U+1F61CU+1F61C, FACE WITH STUCK-OUT TONGUE AND WINKING EYE, Unicode 6.0) and 😝 (U+1F61DU+1F61D, FACE WITH STUCK-OUT TONGUE AND TIGHTLY-CLOSED EYES, Unicode 6.0). The plain tongue-out face was actually the LAST of the three to be standardized, despite being the simplest. Like 😀 in the grinning family, the default variant arrived after its more expressive siblings.

1. 1951Albert Einstein sticks his tongue out for photographer Arthur Sasse at Princeton on his 72nd birthday. The photo becomes one of the most iconic images of the 20th century.↗
2. 2010Unicode 6.0 adds 😜 (winking tongue) and 😝 (squinting tongue). The plain tongue-out face is NOT included.
3. 2012Unicode 6.1 adds 😛 (face with stuck-out tongue). The simplest version arrives last.↗
4. 2015All three tongue faces included in Emoji 1.0. 😛 renamed to 'Face with Tongue' via CLDR.
5. 2017Einstein's original signed tongue-out photo sells at auction for $125,000↗

The tongue-out gesture means completely different things depending on where you are.

In Tibet, it's a greeting and a sign of respect, reportedly dating to the 9th century. In Maori culture, it's part of the haka war dance, signifying strength and ferocity (the All Blacks perform it before rugby matches). In much of Western culture, it's a childish taunt or playful rudeness. In parts of India, it can express shame or embarrassment.

The emoji 😛 carries the Western playful/teasing meaning in most digital contexts. But the gesture's wild variation across cultures is a reminder that a single face can mean "hello" in one country and "I'm mocking you" in another.

• •Einstein stuck his tongue out for photographer Arthur Sasse on his 72nd birthday (March 14, 1951) at Princeton. He wrote: "This gesture you will like, because it is aimed at all of humanity. A civilian can afford to do what no diplomat would dare." The original signed photo sold for $125,000 in 2017.
• •In Tibet, sticking your tongue out is a greeting and a sign of respect, reportedly dating to the 9th century when showing your tongue proved you weren't the reincarnation of a cruel king with a black tongue.
• •The Maori haka features an extended tongue as a sign of strength and ferocity. New Zealand's All Blacks rugby team performs it before matches, making it one of the most televised tongue-out gestures in sports.
• •😛 was added in Unicode 6.1 (2012), two years AFTER 😜 and 😝 (Unicode 6.0, 2010). The plainest tongue face arrived last, just like 😀 arrived after its grinning siblings.
• •People stick their tongues out during concentration because the brain's motor cortex area for tongue control is adjacent to the area for hand movements. Neural signals overflow between them.
• •😛 quietly won the tongue-face wholesomeness bracket. In the 2015 Kralj Novak et al. sentiment study of 1.6 million tweets, it scored 68.6% positive, higher than 😋 (67.7%), 😜 (56.6%), and 😝 (55.5%). The plainer the tongue face, the more sincerely positive its use. 😛 has no wink, no squint, no lip-lick to shade the meaning.
• •The DoggoLingo 'blep' movement, which coined names for animal tongue-out poses around 2013 to 2015, cemented 😛 as the go-to cat-and-dog tongue emoji. An Imgur post from April 23, 2014 is the earliest documented 'mlem' reference, and r/blep and r/mlem on Reddit now have hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
• •Fresh April 2026 Google Trends data shows 😛 is the flatline of the tongue family. While 😜 spiked 7x in 2022 to 2023 and 😋 tripled over six years, 😛 has drifted between 3 and 7 for the entire period. It's the most-used tongue face in everyday chat but almost never the subject of search interest. People use it, they don't analyze it.

• •Albert Einstein's tongue-out photo (March 14, 1951) is one of the most iconic photographs of the 20th century. The Guardian called it "arguably one of the best known press photographs of any 20th century personality." The story behind the photo reveals Einstein was simply tired of smiling for cameras all day on his 72nd birthday. It has been reproduced on more merchandise than any other Einstein image. The kind of historical fact that sounds fake but isn't. Test your instinct for real vs fake facts at Bluffpedia.
• •Michael Jordan's tongue-out dunk became one of the most famous athletic images. He did it instinctively, a case of the neural overflow between hand coordination and tongue movement that Psychology Today documented.
• •The New Zealand All Blacks rugby team's haka features extended tongues as a sign of warrior strength. The greatest haka ever, performed before the 2011 Rugby World Cup final against France, is one of the most watched pre-game rituals in sports history.
• •Miley Cyrus's tongue-out pose became her signature during the 2013 Bangerz era, specifically at the VMAs. It was deliberate provocation, using the gesture's dual meaning (childish + sexual) to force a reaction.

• •😛 is U+1F61BU+1F61B. Unicode name: FACE WITH STUCK-OUT TONGUE. CLDR: "face with tongue." Common shortcodes: :stuck_out_tongue::stuck_out_tongue: (Slack, Discord, GitHub). Added in Unicode 6.1 (2012), unlike 😜 and 😝 which are Unicode 6.0.
• •The tongue-out family shares a pattern with the grinning family: the plain/default version (😛/😀) was added AFTER the more expressive versions (😜😝/😃😄😁). If building an emoji picker timeline, the codepoint order doesn't match the chronological order.

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