Memo Emoji

A sheet of white paper with a yellow pencil mid-stroke, usually showing a few handwritten lines. 📝 is the note-taking emoji: reminders, to-do lists, journal entries, and anything that needs to be written down. It was approved in Unicode 6.0 in 2010 and added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015.

The name "memo" comes from the Latin memorandum, a shortening of the phrase memorandum est, meaning "it must be remembered." English absorbed the word in the 1400s, and by the 1540s it meant the note itself, not just the instruction to remember. 📝 is a thousand-year-old idea rendered as a little square of pixels.

Unlike ✏️ Pencil, which emphasizes the tool, 📝 emphasizes the act and the artifact. The pencil on the page is doing the work. That small distinction is why 📝 dominates captions about notes, lists, and reminders, while ✏️ dominates captions about drafting and drawing.

Apple hid a famous easter egg inside this emoji. Zoom in on the iOS version and the handwritten lines on the paper are actually a miniature of the "Think Different" / Crazy Ones speech from Apple's 1997–2002 ad campaign. The letter starts with "Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers." and is signed off by John Appleseed, Apple's fictional demo user since the 1980s. The same text appears on 📔, 📃, and other Apple paper emojis. It was hidden in plain sight for over a decade before users noticed.

📝 is one of the steadiest workhorses in the emoji catalog. It doesn't trend, doesn't go viral, and doesn't swing between generations. It just shows up anywhere people are writing things down.

On Instagram, 📝 is a staple of #studygram, #bulletjournal, and back-to-school content. Students pair it with 📚, ☕, and 🖊️ to signal study-session vibes. Bullet journal TikTok has 695K+ posts, and 📝 shows up in titles, captions, and video covers across that space.

On Twitter/X, 📝 is the default emoji for thread announcements. "New post up 📝" and "just hit publish 📝" are common sign-offs from writers, journalists, and newsletter authors.

In work Slack and Teams, 📝 carries corporate weight. Product managers use it in meeting notes channels. Project leads use it when posting action items. It's close enough to professional without feeling sterile.

According to Google Trends, search interest for 📝 has roughly doubled since 2020, tracking alongside the broader note-taking boom. The note-taking app market is projected to grow from $576M in 2023 to $2.26B by 2032, and 📝 is the emoji riding that curve.

The word "memo" is short for memorandum, which comes from Latin memorandum est, the gerundive form of memoro ("to call to mind"). The literal translation is "it must be remembered." Medieval English scribes wrote "mem." at the top of notes meant to jog the memory, and by the 1540s the word had transformed from an instruction to a thing. You didn't tell someone to remember; you sent them a memo.

The emoji itself is a direct inheritance from the first Japanese emoji sets. Shigetaka Kurita's 1999 DoCoMo i-mode set included a memo symbol, as did SoftBank's 1997 SkyWalker DP-211SW and KDDI's later sets. When Unicode standardized emoji in Unicode 6.0 in October 2010, U+1F4DD MEMO became official. It sat in a new block called Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs.

Apple's design added something unusual: actual handwriting. Starting with the earliest iPhone versions, the lines on the 📝 emoji weren't random squiggles. They were scaled-down text from the company's 1997 "Think Different" campaign, written as a letter. The full text, which also appears on 📔 Notebook and 📃 Page with Curl, reads: "Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently..." It ends with "Take care, John Appleseed," a nod to Apple's longtime fictional demo user, named after an alias that Mike Markkula (Apple's second CEO) used in early software tests.

The easter egg went unnoticed by most users for over a decade until social media posts in the early 2020s zoomed in and uncovered the text. Apple has never officially acknowledged it.

1. 1999Shigetaka Kurita includes a memo symbol in the original DoCoMo i-mode emoji set. Its design inspires future Unicode versions.
2. 2008Apple's iPhone OS 2.2 emoji set (Japan-only) includes the memo, complete with the hidden 'Think Different' handwriting.
3. 2010Unicode 6.0 formally encodes U+1F4DD MEMO in October 2010, standardizing the symbol across platforms.
4. 2015Emoji 1.0 officially recognizes 📝 as part of the core emoji catalog, extending it beyond iOS to Android, Windows, and Samsung.
5. 2019WhatsApp redesigns 📝 as an old-fashioned office memorandum on pink paper, matching Facebook's earlier design aesthetic.
6. 2022The Apple 'Crazy Ones' hidden letter goes viral on TikTok and Twitter. Users zoom in on the 📝 emoji and discover the 1997 ad copy.
7. 2025Google redesigns 📝 in Noto Color Emoji with a sharper pencil angle and subtly enhanced paper texture, matching the broader Android emoji refresh.

In Japan, the memo emoji has stronger ties to handwritten note-taking than in most Western cultures. Japanese office culture still relies heavily on handwritten meeting notes and memo pads, partly due to the persistence of hanko seal culture and the formality of hand-written correspondence. The 📝 emoji fits into that tradition naturally.

In the US and UK, 📝 reads as slightly formal or corporate. When a Twitter bio says "📝," it usually signals "I write professionally." Compare that to ✏️, which reads as casual or creative. Americans also attach the emoji to announcements more readily, partly because Silicon Valley product culture has normalized "📝 new blog post" as a standard tweet format.

In school-age populations across many countries, 📝 is now synonymous with the #studygram and #studytok aesthetic. Gen Z students pair 📝 with 📚, ☕, and ✨ in posts about aesthetic handwriting, highlighter techniques, and pastel note layouts. Gen Alpha, by contrast, often uses 📝 with digital study apps like GoodNotes and Notability, reflecting the shift from paper to iPad study culture.

In Germany and Nordic countries, 📝 is common in project management contexts. Kanban, originally a Japanese methodology, dominates European tech culture, and 📝 fits naturally into "ticket written" or "task noted" language on Slack.

• •Apple's iOS 📝 emoji contains hidden text from the 1997 "Think Different" ad, including the opening line: "Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers."
• •The letter inside 📝 is signed "John Appleseed," a fictional demo user name Apple has used since the 1980s, originally as an alias by Mike Markkula, Apple's second CEO.
• •"Memo" is short for memorandum, from Latin memorandum est, meaning "it must be remembered." By the 1540s, English had collapsed the phrase into just "memo."
• •The memo concept appeared in the first-ever emoji set: Shigetaka Kurita's 1999 DoCoMo i-mode catalog included a memo symbol, inspired by Japanese office stationery.
• •WhatsApp draws 📝 as pink paper, a stylistic nod to the tear-off office memo pads common from the 1950s through the 1980s.
• •The note-taking app market is projected to grow from $576 million in 2023 to $2.26 billion by 2032, a near 4x increase.
• •Notion search interest has grown roughly 7x since 2020, from 13 to 93 on Google Trends, while Evernote (once the market leader) has declined from 11 to 4 over the same period.
• •Apple Notes search interest 18x'd in late 2025 after Apple Intelligence added AI-powered note summarization, making it a serious Notion competitor for the first time.
• •Bullet journaling peaked around 2020–2022 and has been declining since, partly because the aesthetic moved from paper to iPad apps like GoodNotes.