Knot Emoji

A knot, shown as a loop of rope tied in a decorative or functional pattern. 🪢 covers the literal (rope, sailing, macramé), the ceremonial ("tying the knot" for marriage), and the figurative (bonds, connection, complications, being tangled up).

Added in Unicode 14.0 / Emoji 14.0 (2021). Before this emoji existed, there was no clean way to say rope, knot, sailing, macramé, or marriage-as-binding. It filled an unusually wide gap.

Knots are older than writing. Older than the wheel. Possibly older than agriculture. The Inca quipu used knotted cotton or camelid fibers to record census data, tax levels, and imperial history for an empire of 10+ million people. A three-dimensional writing system made of rope, decoded by specialists called khipukamayuq. Archaeologists still can't read most of them.

Chinese knotting (中國結, zhōngguó jié) is a continuous folk art dating to the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE), originally used for record-keeping before paper. The "double happiness" knot (雙喜結) is a standard wedding decoration across Chinese weddings; the concentric knot (同心結) is exchanged by bride and groom. Celtic knots, from about 450 CE, have no beginning or end and symbolize eternity. The Book of Kells is covered in them.

The marriage idiom is more literal than it sounds. Under Irish Brehon law (7th-17th century), the handfasting ceremony bound the couple's wrists with cord. The initial binding committed them to a trial marriage of one year and a day. "Tying the knot" wasn't a metaphor. It was the actual ceremony.

🪢 has four separate audiences that rarely see each other's posts.

Wedding and engagement content. By volume, this is the biggest use. Save-the-dates, engagement announcements, bachelorette captions. Pairing 🪢💍 reads instantly as "we're getting married" in English-speaking markets.

Macramé and fiber crafts. The craft world claimed this emoji early. Macramé was named 2024 Craft of the Year, driven by TikTok and Instagram tutorials. Wall hangings, plant hangers, keychains, rope bag handles, all tagged 🪢🧶.

Sailing and nautical. Sailors, scouts, climbers, and paracord communities use it literally. The Ashley Book of Knots catalogs 3,857 distinct knots, and there's a member of the International Guild of Knot Tyers for most of them. Bowline, reef, cleat hitch, figure-eight, all part of a vocabulary most of us never learn.

Complications and tangles. "My schedule is knotted up 🪢", "the bureaucracy is 🪢", "my love life is one big 🪢." The "tangled" meaning is usually self-deprecating, not serious.

In Chinese-speaking internet communities, 🪢 often stands in for 中國結 or specific knots like 盤長結 (pan chang, the endless knot), a Buddhist-derived symbol of unbroken continuity. The emoji doesn't visually match those traditions well, but it's the only rope-knot emoji available.

"Tied to you 🪢" reads as romantic. The knot as a bonding metaphor carries real weight. In non-romantic contexts, it's about crafts, sailing, or complications.

• •🪢💍 = tying the knot, marriage or engagement
• •🪢❤️ = bonded together, romantic
• •🪢🧶 = crafting, not romantic
• •🪢🤯 = tangled up, probably a problem
• •🪢✂️ = cutting the knot, can imply divorce

Knots are among humanity's oldest inventions, possibly pre-dating controlled fire. The earliest surviving knotted fiber, found in Ohalo II, Israel, is roughly 19,000 years old, and that's just what survived.

Four deep cultural threads feed the modern knot emoji.

Inca quipu (circa 3000 BCE onward, peak 1400-1532 CE). The quipu encoded numbers in a decimal system using knot type, position, and cord color. It also encoded narrative information we still can't decode. It was administrative infrastructure for an empire of millions. The Spanish, not understanding what they were looking at, burned most of them.

Chinese knotting (Tang dynasty, 618-907 CE onward). Zhōngguó jié started as a record-keeping system before paper (the same niche quipu filled in the Andes), then became a ritual and decorative art. The double-happiness knot is a standard feature at Chinese weddings. The endless knot (盤長結) is one of the Eight Auspicious Symbols in Tibetan Buddhism.

Celtic knots (450 CE onward). Emerged in Insular Art around 450 CE and dominate the Book of Kells. They're topologically continuous loops with no beginning or end, symbolizing eternity. Celtic artists were producing mathematically complex knot patterns 1,400 years before knot theory existed as a branch of mathematics.

Celtic handfasting and "tying the knot." Under Brehon law (7th-17th century Ireland), couples' wrists were bound with cord during their marriage ceremony. The phrase became the English idiom. Handfasting is now back in fashion at modern weddings, usually with several colored ribbons instead of one cord.

The emoji came last: 2021, more than 19,000 years after the first knot.

Added in Emoji 14.0 (2021) alongside 🫶 heart hands, 🫂 people hugging, and 🪩 mirror ball. Single code point, U+1FAA2. Named "KNOT." The emoji was proposed in 2019 with macramé, sailing, and "tying the knot" all cited as justifications. No ZWJ required.

1. -17000Earliest surviving knotted fiber (Ohalo II, Israel). Knot technology is already old by the time anything else happens.
2. -3000Inca predecessors begin developing quipu, the knotted-string record-keeping system that will run an empire.
3. 100Pan chang (endless knot) appears in Chinese Buddhist iconography; later one of the Eight Auspicious Symbols of Tibetan Buddhism.
4. 450Celtic knotwork emerges in Insular Art. No beginning, no end, eternity encoded in rope.
5. 618Tang-dynasty Chinese knotting (zhōngguó jié) enters daily life as decoration, ritual, and memory aid.
6. 700Irish Brehon law recognizes handfasting: the wrist-binding marriage ceremony that gives English the phrase "tying the knot."
7. 800Book of Kells is illuminated with dense Celtic knotwork, fixing the aesthetic for the next 1,200 years.
8. 1944Clifford W. Ashley publishes The Ashley Book of Knots with 3,857 knots catalogued across 7,000 illustrations.
9. 2021Encoded in Unicode 14.0 as U+1FAA2, finally giving macramé, sailors, and fiancés their own emoji.

• •"Tying the knot" comes from Celtic handfasting, where couples' hands were literally bound with cord during the ceremony. Under Brehon law, the initial binding was a one-year-and-a-day trial marriage.
• •The Inca quipu was a three-dimensional writing system made of knotted strings, used to run an empire of 10+ million people. The Spanish burned most of them and we still can't decode the ones that survived.
• •The Ashley Book of Knots (1944) catalogs 3,857 distinct knots with ~7,000 illustrations. It took Clifford W. Ashley 11 years to write. Sailors still cite knots by their ABoK number.
• •Chinese knotting started during the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE) as a record-keeping system before paper, then became ceremonial. Red knots dominate Lunar New Year decor and weddings.
• •Celtic knots (from 450 CE) have no beginning or end, symbolizing eternity. Celtic artists created mathematically complex patterns 1,400 years before knot theory existed.
• •The earliest surviving knotted fiber, found at Ohalo II in Israel, is about 19,000 years old. Knots predate agriculture, pottery, and the wheel.
• •World Knot Tying Day is December 18, chosen to mark the birthday of Clifford Ashley by the International Guild of Knot Tyers.
• •Macramé was named 2024's Craft of the Year, fueled by a COVID-era TikTok boom that never really went away.
• •The Japanese knot tradition mizuhiki uses different knot types for occasions: the reusable awaji-musubi for general celebration, and the single-use musubi-kiri on wedding or funeral envelopes, where you don't want a repeat.

• •The Book of Kells (~800 CE). The Book of Kells is covered in some of the most intricate Celtic knotwork ever produced. It's still the visual shorthand for "eternity" in Western design, tattoo art, and Celtic-inspired jewelry.
• •The Ashley Book of Knots (1944). Clifford W. Ashley's 3,857-knot encyclopedia is still the working reference for sailors, climbers, and arborists worldwide. Ashley's numbered system means "Bowline, ABoK #1010" is the same knot anywhere in the world.
• •Macramé TikTok revival (2020-2024). The COVID-era macramé boom turned the emoji into the default tag for fiber-craft content. Macramé was named Craft of the Year for 2024.

• •Single code point: U+1FAA2U+1FAA2. No ZWJ needed.
• •No variants, modifiers, or tone variations.
• •Shortcodes: :knot::knot: on Slack and Discord.
• •Useful in wedding apps, craft marketplaces, nautical content, and anywhere the "tying together" metaphor fits.
• •Emoji 14.0 support required. Devices pre-2021 render a tofu box.

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