Frog Emoji

A green frog face with large round eyes, shown front-on. Emojipedia files it under animals-and-nature. Approved in Unicode 6.0 (October 2010) as U+1F438U+1F438 FROG FACE, based on Japanese carrier designs from SoftBank and KDDI. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015.

🐸 is the emoji that means three different things at once. The same pixels can point to Kermit the Frog sipping tea, Pepe the Frog, or an actual frog a cottagecore account photographed on a mushroom. Context does all the work, and context isn't always available. This is the most meme-loaded animal emoji after 💀.

The 🐸☕ combo is the single most recognizable pairing. It means 'I'm throwing shade and pretending I'm not.' The meme traces to a 2014 still from a Lipton Tea commercial showing Kermit drinking iced tea, captioned 'But that's none of my business.' The phrase became shorthand for passive-aggressive commentary, and the emoji pair became shorthand for the phrase. Facebook's early frog emoji actually resembled Kermit, which closed the loop between glyph and meme almost literally.

Pepe the Frog is the third identity and the complicated one. Matt Furie drew Pepe in 2005 for his indie comic Boy's Club, a laid-back chill-roommate strip with the catchphrase 'feels good man.' The image migrated to Myspace, Gaia Online, 4chan's /b/ (from 2008 onward), then Tumblr, then the 2015–2016 alt-right cycle that got Pepe added to the ADL's hate symbol database in September 2016. The ADL notes that most Pepe usage is non-hateful. Furie publicly killed the character in a 2017 comic strip, then sued InfoWars and others to reclaim him. The 2020 documentary Feels Good Man covers the whole arc. 🐸 inherits every layer of that history every time someone sends it.

🐸 is used four ways that rarely overlap.

🐸☕ shade. By far the top usage. 'Your ex is dating her best friend's sister 🐸☕.' You drop an observation, add the tea, and opt out of the argument you just started. It's the emoji version of 'just saying.' The tea gives you plausible deniability.

Wholesome frogcore. A second identity that grew up on Tumblr and TikTok in 2020, aligned with the cottagecore surge. Froggy chair, mushroom photos, pond aesthetics, 'frogs with tiny hats.' 🐸🌿🍄 over autumn photos, morning-walk captions, plant-shelf shelfies. Gen Z keeps this one alive.

Pepe references. Mostly 4chan, /r/greentext, meme Twitter, and the occasional normie using it without realizing. 🐸 near the word 'kek' or 'based' is almost always Pepe. Some accounts avoid the emoji entirely to sidestep the association.

Feeling froggy. US Black slang meaning ready to fight or ready to do something bold. 'If you feel froggy, jump' has been in circulation since at least the 1960s. The emoji gets pulled into confidence captions: 'feeling froggy today 🐸,' 'pulled up feeling froggy 🐸.' Not the same reading as cottagecore; same glyph.

Wednesday. Every Wednesday since 2016, someone somewhere posts the screaming frog with 'It is Wednesday my dudes.' The meme started as a 2014 Tumblr image, went viral via Jimmy Here's Vine video, and refuses to die. 🐸 on a Wednesday needs no explanation.

Unicode 6.0 landed on October 11, 2010, and FROG FACE was one of hundreds of animal glyphs absorbed from Japanese carrier emoji sets. SoftBank and KDDI both shipped frog emojis in the 2000s, and Unicode codified the design that became U+1F438U+1F438. The 'face' in the name reflects that the emoji is a front-on head, not a full-bodied frog. Emoji 1.0 (2015) added 🐸🐸 to the master list shipped by Apple and Google, which is when it became available to keyboards worldwide.

The cultural frog story is older than the emoji. Kermit the Frog debuted on Sam and Friends in 1955; Matt Furie drew Pepe in 2005; Aesop's Frogs Who Desired a King is pre-Christian. The emoji inherited all of it instantly. Within five years of its 2015 rollout, 🐸 had three meme identities competing for the same pixels.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (October 2010) as U+1F438U+1F438 FROG FACE, based on Japanese carrier designs (SoftBank, KDDI). Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015.

1. 2010FROG FACE approved in Unicode 6.0 on October 11
2. 2014The 'But That's None of My Business' Kermit meme goes viral on Twitter
3. 2014'It is Wednesday my dudes' screaming-frog image first appears on Tumblr
4. 2015Emoji 1.0 rollout. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook ship 🐸 on all platforms
5. 2015Facebook's first frog emoji design resembles Kermit the Frog directly
6. 2016ADL adds Pepe the Frog to its hate symbol database on September 27
7. 2017Matt Furie symbolically kills Pepe in a one-page comic for Fantagraphics' Free Comic Book Day
8. 2020Feels Good Man documentary (Arthur Jones) premieres at Sundance and wins a Special Jury Prize
9. 2020Cottagecore/frogcore surge drives 🐸 back toward wholesome readings on TikTok and Tumblr
10. 2021Pepe NFTs (PEGZ, Rare Pepes) sell at auction for six-figure prices
11. 2024Facebook updates its frog emoji design, finally moving away from the Kermit look

• •Facebook's first frog emoji design closely resembled Kermit the Frog, blurring the line between emoji and Muppet. Most other platforms kept a generic green frog.
• •The Japanese word for frog is 'kaeru' (蛙), which is pronounced identically to 'to return' (帰る). Travelers carry small frog amulets to return home safely. 🐸 in Japanese texts often carries this lucky-return reading.
• •'Feeling froggy' is US Black slang meaning ready to fight or make a move. Documented in Green's Dictionary of Slang back to the 1960s. 'If you feel froggy, jump' is the full phrase.
• •The 'It is Wednesday my dudes' frog is a South American Common Toad (Rhinella marina), not a frog. Ten years of memes and nobody's fixed the taxonomy.
• •Matt Furie sued InfoWars over unauthorized Pepe merchandise and won a $15,000 settlement in 2019. He used the proceeds to fund pro-frog charity work.
• •The money frog (金蟾) in Chinese feng shui is a three-legged toad holding a coin in its mouth. Placed near a business entrance to attract wealth.
• •Frogger (Konami, 1981) was the first video game with a frog protagonist. Its 'cross the road' gameplay is one of the most-imitated mechanics in arcade history.
• •The smallest known frog is Paedophryne amauensis, measuring 7.7mm. Also the smallest vertebrate on Earth. 🐸 flatters it.
• •Kermit the Frog's first TV appearance was on Sam and Friends in 1955, seven years before The Muppet Show existed. Jim Henson made him from his mother's old green coat and a ping-pong ball cut in half for eyes.

• •Kermit the Frog (Jim Henson, 1955) is one of the most beloved characters in entertainment history. The 2014 'sipping tea' meme gave him a second life as the internet's shade mascot.
• •Pepe the Frog (Matt Furie, 2005) went from indie comic to internet meme to alt-right symbol to reclaimed art, with a 2020 documentary covering the whole arc. 🐸 inherits every chapter.
• •'It is Wednesday my dudes' is a weekly frog meme that refuses to die. Ten years after the original Tumblr post, Wednesday frog still trends every week somewhere on the internet.
• •The Frog Prince (Brothers Grimm, 1812) is the older European reference layer. 🐸👑 and 🐸💋 both pull on this story.
• •Frogger (Konami, 1981) is the canonical frog video game. '🐸 like Frogger' is still used in Gen X gaming circles.
• •The Princess and the Frog (Disney, 2009) refreshed the Frog Prince story for a new generation and tied 🐸 to New Orleans jazz imagery.

• •🐸 is U+1F438U+1F438. Unicode name: FROG FACE. Common shortcodes: :frog::frog: (Slack, Discord, GitHub, Twitter).
• •ZWJ sequences: there are no official multi-person frog sequences. The emoji is a single codepoint with no skin-tone variants.
• •Don't sanitize 🐸 out of user-generated content on brand safety grounds alone. The ADL itself notes most usage is benign; false positives will annoy frogcore users.

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