Gorilla Emoji

A gorilla shown in full body or as a face with a broad nose and dark fur. 🦍 represents raw physical strength, dominance, and primal power. It's the emoji of choice for gym culture, powerlifting, and anyone channeling "beast mode." But its cultural footprint extends far beyond the weight room. 🦍 is tangled up in one of the internet's most enduring memes, a billion-dollar VR game, crypto rebellion, and an animal-debate subculture that never sleeps.

Added in Unicode 9.0 (2016), the same year Harambe was shot at the Cincinnati Zoo and became one of the most viral memes in internet history. That timing is coincidental (the emoji was already in the pipeline) but it cemented 🦍 as a symbol of internet mourning, absurdist humor, and collective outrage. The phrase "dicks out for Harambe" became inescapable, and the Cincinnati Zoo eventually deleted its Twitter account because trolls would not stop.

🦍 also carries heavy weight in crypto and meme-stock culture. "Apes together strong," borrowed from Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), became the rallying cry of Reddit's r/WallStreetBets during the GameStop short squeeze of 2021. Retail investors called themselves "apes" and flooded chats with 🦍🚀. Beyond finance, the gorilla appears in conversations about Gorilla Tag, the VR phenomenon with over 10 million players and $100 million in revenue, and in the perennial internet debate: gorilla vs. lion, who wins?

On social media, 🦍 splits across several distinct communities.

Fitness accounts use it for PR lifts, beast-mode energy, and silverback physique goals. It pairs naturally with 💪, 🏋️, and 🔥. Powerlifting Instagram is basically a 🦍 farm.

Crypto and meme-stock communities adopted 🦍 (alongside 🦧) as their mascot during the 2021 GameStop saga. "Apes together strong" became a unifying slogan, and "🦍🚀" shorthand for "hold the stock, we're going to the moon." The emoji stuck.

Meme culture still deploys 🦍 for Harambe callbacks. The meme peaked in 2016 but never truly died. Nine years on, a lit candle emoji next to a gorilla is still an instant reference.

Gaming communities associate it with Gorilla Tag, the free-to-play VR game that became Generation Alpha's preferred virtual hangout, accumulating 10 billion TikTok views by 2024. Parents of 10-year-olds on Meta Quest will recognize this emoji instantly.

Conservation accounts use 🦍 for the four gorilla subspecies and mountain gorilla success stories. Mountain gorillas are one of the few great-ape populations actually growing (1,004 in 2018 to over 1,063 by 2024), making 🦍 an emoji with real good news attached to it.

In DMs and group chats, sending 🦍 usually means "that's powerful," "absolute unit," or a tongue-in-cheek Harambe reference. It's rarely ambiguous. Nobody sends a gorilla emoji to mean something delicate.

🦍 was proposed alongside several other missing-mammal emojis (shark, butterfly, deer, squid) in Unicode's 2015 candidate set. It was approved in Unicode 9.0 on June 21, 2016 as part of a batch that notably also included 🤦 face-palm and 🤷 shrug. The original Emoji 3.0 version shipped in mid-2016.

The timing was surreal. On May 28, 2016, weeks before the emoji rolled out to most devices, Harambe the 17-year-old western lowland gorilla was shot at the Cincinnati Zoo after a 3-year-old boy fell into his enclosure. The resulting meme storm was so intense that by the time 🦍 landed on phones, it already had a fully-formed subcultural meaning: internet mourning, absurdist humor, anti-establishment irony.

The emoji's later life followed a similar pattern of sudden cultural adoption. In January 2021, Reddit's r/WallStreetBets picked up "apes together strong" from Rise of the Planet of the Apes and turned 🦍 into a tribal badge for retail investors during the GameStop short squeeze. By 2022-2024 Gorilla Tag turned the emoji into a Generation Alpha identifier.

For most of the previous half-century, the cultural image of the gorilla was shaped by two women: Dian Fossey, who lived with mountain gorillas in Rwanda from 1966 until her 1985 murder and whose book Gorillas in the Mist became the 1988 Sigourney Weaver film, and Koko), the western lowland gorilla who learned over 1,000 signs of modified American Sign Language and graced two National Geographic covers. Both helped rewrite the species' public image from King Kong menace to intelligent, emotional family animal.

1. 2015Gorilla emoji proposed to Unicode alongside shark, butterfly, deer, face-palm, shrug
2. 2016Approved in Unicode 9.0 as U+1F98D GORILLA on June 21, 2016↗
3. 2016Harambe shot at Cincinnati Zoo (May 28); Harambe meme storm lasts months; 🦍 cemented as internet-mourning symbol↗
4. 2018Koko the sign-language gorilla dies at 46; 🦍 trends in obituaries and tribute posts↗
5. 2021GameStop short squeeze: r/WallStreetBets adopts 🦍 and "apes together strong"; emoji becomes tribal retail-investor badge↗
6. 2022Gorilla Tag VR game explodes; Generation Alpha adopts 🦍 as gaming identity marker↗
7. 2024Mountain gorillas pass 1,063 individuals, up 26% from 2018; rare great-ape recovery story↗

In Rwanda, Uganda, and the DRC, gorillas are a source of national pride and a major tourism draw. Mountain gorilla trekking in Volcanoes National Park (Rwanda) and Bwindi Impenetrable Forest (Uganda) is a top-tier conservation success story. Dian Fossey's Karisoke Research Center has been running since 1967. Using 🦍 in Rwandan or Ugandan conservation contexts carries the weight of actual national identity.

In the United States, 🦍 is mostly pop-cultural (Harambe, King Kong, Donkey Kong, Gorilla Tag) and secondarily fitness-coded. The crypto/meme-stock adoption is a uniquely American Reddit culture export that spread globally.

In Japan, 🦍 has a gentler cultural footprint, often showing up in fitness and gaming contexts without the Harambe baggage. Magilla Gorilla never hit the same way there.

In gym and powerlifting subcultures worldwide, 🦍 is shorthand for serious training. It's aspirational, not ironic.

Like every other primate emoji, 🦍 has been weaponized as racial abuse online, drawing on centuries-old dehumanizing tropes directed at Black people. Emojipedia has documented the pattern, and the Meta Oversight Board's 2026 ruling on monkey-emoji hate speech extends to the ape family. Context is always the deciding factor.

• •Harambe was a 17-year-old western lowland gorilla shot at the Cincinnati Zoo on May 28, 2016, after a 3-year-old boy fell into his enclosure. "Dicks out for Harambe" became one of the most viral phrases of the year. The zoo deleted its Twitter account after being targeted by trolls daily.
• •Twenty years before Harambe, Binti Jua, an 8-year-old gorilla at Chicago's Brookfield Zoo, cradled a 3-year-old boy who fell into her enclosure and carried him to zookeepers. She was named Newsweek Hero of the Year in 1996.
• •Koko), a western lowland gorilla in California, learned over 1,000 modified sign-language signs and understood 2,000 English words. She adopted multiple kittens, including one she named "All Ball." She died at 46 in 2018.
• •Gorilla Tag, a free VR game where players swing through environments as gorillas using only their arms for movement, crossed 10 million players and $100 million in revenue by 2024. Videos of the game have accumulated 10 billion TikTok views.
• •The "gorilla vs. lion" debate is one of the internet's most enduring animal hypotheticals. A silverback gorilla can deliver a bite force of 1,300 PSI and is roughly ten times as strong as an adult human, but a lion has claws, speed (35 mph), and predator instincts. Forums have been arguing since the early 2000s with no resolution.
• •Dian Fossey was murdered in her cabin at Karisoke on December 26, 1985, likely by poachers she had spent years fighting. She's buried next to Digit, the gorilla whose death in 1977 had pushed her into full-on activism.
• •The Cross River gorilla has fewer than 300 wild individuals, all along the Nigeria-Cameroon border. They were first scientifically recognized in 1904, then essentially forgotten, then rediscovered in the 1980s.
• •Gorillas' chest-beating isn't just aggression. Recent research shows the beats encode body size, letting distant gorillas read a silverback's physical presence without seeing him.

• •King Kong (1933, 2005, 2017): The original giant-ape film, repeatedly remade. The 2005 Peter Jackson version grossed over $550 million. King Kong is probably the single most recognizable fictional gorilla in Western culture and a recurring reference point for the 🦍 emoji.
• •Donkey Kong (1981): Nintendo's Donkey Kong started as an arcade villain (originally a giant ape climbing up girders with barrels). He's since become one of Nintendo's flagship characters, with the recent Donkey Kong Bananza a top-seller on Switch 2 in 2025.
• •Gorillas in the Mist (1988): Sigourney Weaver's Oscar-nominated portrayal of Dian Fossey, the American primatologist who lived with mountain gorillas in Rwanda from 1966 to her 1985 murder. The film introduced mainstream audiences to gorilla family structures.
• •Koko, the sign-language gorilla (1971-2018): Koko) learned over 1,000 modified American Sign Language signs and understood 2,000 words of spoken English. She appeared twice on the cover of National Geographic, adopted kittens, and helped reshape public understanding of animal intelligence. She died at 46 in 2018.
• •Rise / Dawn / War for the Planet of the Apes (2011-2017): The Andy Serkis-led reboot trilogy gave the 21st century its best cinematic gorilla in Maurice's counterpart Buck and in Caesar's army. The line "apes together strong" from the first film became a WallStreetBets slogan a decade later.
• •Gorilla Tag (2021+): The free-to-play Meta Quest VR game by Another Axiom has over 10 million players, 1 million daily users, and $100 million in revenue. One in three Quest owners has tried it. It's the most-played standalone VR game ever, with an audience dominated by kids ages 7-14.
• •Magilla Gorilla (1964) and Grape Ape (1975): Classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons whose anthropomorphic gorillas shaped the mid-century American mental image of the species.

• •Gorilla is U+1F98DU+1F98D (E3.0, 2016). Solo character.
• •Shortcodes: :gorilla::gorilla: on Slack / Discord / GitHub.
• •No skin tone modifiers apply to animal emojis.
• •Content moderation: The Meta Oversight Board's 2026 ruling on monkey-emoji hate speech applies to the full primate family including 🦍. Worth accounting for in moderation tooling.

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