Lime Emoji
U+1F34B U+200D U+1F7E9About Lime 🍋🟩
Lime () is part of the Food & Drink group in Unicode. Added in Unicode E15.1. On Discord it's . Click copy above to grab it, paste it anywhere.
Works in iMessage, WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, Instagram, Twitter, Gmail, and every app that supports Unicode.
Often associated with acidity, citrus, cocktail, and 12 more keywords.
Meaning varies across cultures, see cultural notes below.
Scroll down for the full story: meaning, trends, combos, and more.
How it looks
What does it mean?
A green lime, shown whole or wedged on most platforms. For 13 years, anyone who wanted a lime emoji had to send 🍋 and hope the reader understood. The lime finally got representation in Emoji 15.1 (2023) through a clever technical hack: it's a ZWJ sequence that glues 🍋 Lemon to 🟩 Green Square. Unicode didn't add a new codepoint; it just recolored the lemon.
In everyday texting, 🍋🟩 means cocktails (margaritas, mojitos, gin and tonics, caipirinhas), Mexican and Thai food, ceviche, summer drinks, and fresh flavor. Occasionally it shows up in "green with envy" or color-joke contexts, but the fruit meaning dominates.
The lime-versus-lemon gap was one of the most complained-about omissions in the emoji set. Lemons had been in Unicode since 2010. For over a decade, billions of people whose cuisines depend on lime, Mexican, Brazilian, Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, were texting yellow emojis for a green fruit. When the lime finally arrived, it was one of the most-shared additions in Emoji 15.1.
Cocktail content is the biggest driver. Margarita posts, mojito reels, summer drink tutorials, and bar menus all pulled in 🍋🟩 immediately once platforms updated. The lime wedge is the universal cocktail garnish and bartenders have been waiting years for this.
Food TikTok reached for it even faster. Mexican street food, Thai cooking, ceviche, Vietnamese pho, pad thai, Indian chutneys. Any cuisine where lime juice is structural, not optional. Recipe captions use 🍋🟩 as a quick ingredient marker now that it's available.
Wellness TikTok tries to make "lime water" happen the way lemon water happened, with mixed success. The lime's identity remains mostly literal. Unlike 🍋 lemon (which carries Beyoncé, proverbs, and legal slang) or 🍊 tangerine (which picks up political and seasonal meanings), 🍋🟩 is almost pure fruit. That's rare for an emoji.
It represents a lime, the green citrus fruit. Used for cocktails, Mexican and Thai food, ceviche, summer drinks, and any context where lime flavor or freshness is relevant. Unlike 🍋 lemon, which carries Beyoncé and proverb baggage, the lime stays mostly literal.
The 13-Year Lime Gap
The Fruit Emoji Family
What it means from...
Not flirty. 🍋🟩 is almost entirely about food and drinks. If someone sends it, they're probably planning cocktails or tacos, not expressing attraction. The lime has no romantic coding yet.
Cocktail plans, Mexican food, cooking content. "Margaritas tonight? 🍋🟩🍹" is the standard invite. Also common in ingredient lists shared between friends.
Cooking together, date night at a Mexican or Thai place, or summer drinks on the balcony. Collaborative and literal.
Happy hour plans or recipe sharing. The safest food emoji to send a coworker, it carries zero innuendo and no cultural minefield.
Cooking, recipes, cultural food traditions. In South Asian or Latin American families, a lime emoji is practically a pantry staple.
How 🍋🟩 Is Used
Emoji combos
Origin story
The lime emoji has the most unusual technical backstory in the modern emoji set. Instead of getting a dedicated codepoint, Unicode used a ZWJ sequence: 🍋 Lemon () + ZWJ () + 🟩 Green Square (). This lets platforms recolor existing emojis without expanding the codepoint space. The same pattern shows up in other Emoji 15.1 additions like the phoenix, the brown mushroom, and the wireless-earbud-on-case variants.
The request for a lime was among the most persistent in emoji history. Lemon had existed since Unicode 6.0 (2010). For 13 years, the only lime workarounds were sending 🍋 and hoping, or pairing it with 🟢. When Emoji 15.1 shipped, lime was among the most-anticipated additions, according to Emojipedia's launch coverage.
The ZWJ trick has one real cost: on platforms without proper ZWJ support, 🍋🟩 renders as two separate characters, 🍋🟩. An iPhone on iOS 16 or older, an Android device on a stale system font, most older smart TVs and car displays, they all show a lemon next to a green square. The fallback is literal and slightly absurd.
Lime's backstory goes further than Unicode. James Lind's 1747 citrus-and-scurvy experiment led to one of the strangest naval laws in history: the Merchant Shipping Act 1867, which required British Royal Navy and Merchant Navy ships to give sailors a daily lime or lemon juice ration. Australians started calling the lime-juice ships "limejuicers" and the men "limeys," and the term jumped to America around 1880 as slang for Englishmen generally. The emoji is, in some cosmic sense, a 156-year-old insult.
Design history
- 2023Lime added in Emoji 15.1 as a ZWJ sequence (Lemon + Green Square), one of the most-anticipated additions of the year↗
- 2024iOS 17.4 and Android 14 ship native lime rendering. Samsung and Google designs both pick a wedge-forward look, Apple keeps the whole fruit.
- 2025Most messaging platforms (Discord, Slack, WhatsApp) fully support the ZWJ sequence. Older fallbacks still produce 🍋🟩 on stale OS versions.
Around the world
Mexico
In Mexico, "limón" usually means lime, not lemon, a source of endless confusion for American tourists. Limes go on tacos, into salsas, over soups like pozole, and into every drink. The 2014 lime shortage (weather + disease + Knights Templar cartel extortion in Michoacán) quintupled US wholesale prices right before Cinco de Mayo.
India
Lime is in religious ritual (nimbu mirchi evil-eye charm), cooking, and pickles. Lime pickle (nimbu ka achaar) is a staple condiment. Street vendors sell nimbu pani (lime water with salt and cumin) everywhere. "Limca" is the most popular domestic lemon-lime soda.
Thailand & Vietnam
Lime (manao in Thai, chanh in Vietnamese) is as fundamental as salt. Pad thai, tom yum, som tam, bun cha, pho, every iconic dish needs it. Cutting a lime wrong in a Vietnamese kitchen is a minor scandal.
United Kingdom (historical)
"Limey" is British-American slang dating to the Merchant Shipping Act of 1867, which required Royal Navy sailors to drink lime juice against scurvy. Australians called the ships "limejuicers." The word "limey" reached America around 1880 and stuck as a term for Englishmen.
United States (Florida Keys)
Key lime pie has been Florida's official state pie since 2006. Invented in Key West in the 1890s when canned sweetened condensed milk solved the no-refrigeration problem. Commercial key lime farms were wiped out by the 1926 Miami hurricane and never really came back.
Western cocktail bars
The lime wedge is the universal garnish. Margarita, mojito, caipirinha, gin and tonic, dark and stormy, Moscow mule, Corona. A bar without lime is a bar with a problem. Rose's Lime Juice, patented in 1867 by Lauchlin Rose, invented shelf-stable cordial and kickstarted the Gimlet.
Because of the Merchant Shipping Act of 1867, which required Royal Navy and Merchant Navy sailors to drink a daily lime juice ration against scurvy. Australians called the ships "limejuicers," and the term "limey" crossed to America by 1880 as slang for Englishmen.
In Mexico and most of Latin America, "limón" usually means lime. What Americans call a lemon is often called "limón amarillo" (yellow lime) or "limón real." This is a constant source of ordering confusion for tourists.
Often confused with
🥝 is kiwi, brown-skinned with green flesh and black seeds. Same color when sliced, completely different fruit and texture. Kiwi usage is rare outside of fruit-salad and New Zealand contexts.
🥝 is kiwi, brown-skinned with green flesh and black seeds. Same color when sliced, completely different fruit and texture. Kiwi usage is rare outside of fruit-salad and New Zealand contexts.
🍋 is a lemon (yellow, slightly sweeter). 🍋🟩 is a lime (green, tarter). Flavor-wise and culturally they're different fruits, but technically the lime is built on the lemon's codepoint with a green modifier. On old systems the lime falls back to appearing as lemon + green square.
Do's and don'ts
- ✓Use for cocktails, Mexican / Thai / Vietnamese food, and summer drinks
- ✓Use for any recipe that calls for lime juice
- ✓Pair with food emojis for cuisine-specific posts
Caption ideas
Aesthetic sets
Fun facts
- •The lime emoji is technically a lemon in a green wrapper: a ZWJ sequence of 🍋 Lemon + 🟩 Green Square, not a dedicated Unicode character.
- •On devices without ZWJ support (older iPhones, old Androids, most car displays), 🍋🟩 falls back to rendering as 🍋🟩, two side-by-side emojis. The fallback is literal and slightly absurd.
- •During the 2014 Mexican lime shortage, wholesale lime prices in the US quintupled because of weather, disease, and the Knights Templar cartel extorting Michoacán lime growers. Some US bars rationed lime wedges before Cinco de Mayo.
- •Key lime pie became Florida's official state pie in July 2006. Commercial key lime farms were wiped out by the 1926 Miami hurricane and most American "key lime" pie today is made with Persian limes from Mexico.
- •The 1867 Merchant Shipping Act made daily lime juice mandatory on British ships. That's why Americans call Brits "limeys." The same year, Lauchlin Rose patented Rose's Lime Juice, the first shelf-stable cordial.
- •Limes are more popular than lemons in most tropical cuisines. Mexico, India, Thailand, Vietnam, and Brazil all use limes as staple ingredients; lemons are secondary.
- •James Lind's 1747 citrus experiment proved citrus cured scurvy. The Royal Navy ignored the finding for over 40 years, during which time scurvy killed more British sailors than enemy action. In the Seven Years' War alone, the Navy lost 133,708 men to it.
- •The lime emoji was one of the most anticipated additions in Emoji 15.1, according to Emojipedia's launch coverage. The proposal got approved after sustained public pressure, especially from food and cocktail accounts.
In pop culture
- •The Coconut Song / Harry Nilsson's "Coconut" (1971): "She put the lime in the coconut" is one of the most recognizable lime lyrics in pop, famously revived in Practical Magic and every SSRI commercial parody.
- •Corona & lime: The ritual of stuffing a lime wedge into a Corona bottle has no Mexican origin. It was a 1980s US marketing invention, probably starting with a bet at a California bar, and it became so universal that Corona's brand identity and the lime emoji are now bundled in most minds.
- •Key Lime Pie: Florida's official state pie since 2006. Invented in Key West in the 1890s by sponge fishermen and their wives using canned condensed milk (no refrigeration on the Keys) and tiny tart key limes. Commercial key lime farming in Florida collapsed after the 1926 hurricane.
- •"Limey": 156-year-old British-American slang, dating to the Royal Navy's 1867 daily lime-juice ration against scurvy. Steven Soderbergh's 1999 film The Limey leans entirely on the term.
- •Lime (the scooter company): the fluorescent-green e-scooter brand owns enough of the color that the lime emoji briefly reads as "rental scooter" in dense urban contexts. That association will probably fade; the fruit one won't.
Trivia
For developers
- •ZWJ sequence: (Lemon) + (ZWJ) + (Green Square). Three codepoints.
- •Fallback rendering: on platforms without ZWJ support, displays as 🍋🟩. Always test on target devices.
- •The same ZWJ-color pattern was used for other Emoji 15.1 additions (brown mushroom, pink heart color variants). Expect more "recolor via ZWJ" emoji in future releases.
The lime is a ZWJ sequence (lemon + green square). On older devices or platforms without ZWJ support, it renders as two separate emojis: 🍋🟩. Update to iOS 17.4+ or Android 14+ for proper rendering.
Emoji 15.1 in September 2023. Lemons had existed since Unicode 6.0 (2010), making limes one of the longest-awaited fruit emoji additions in the platform's history.
See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.
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