Mosquito Emoji

A mosquito shown in profile with a long proboscis, thin legs, and translucent wings. 🦟 is one of the only emojis ever proposed for explicit public-health reasons: Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation co-authored the 2017 Unicode proposal specifically to help the WHO and NGOs talk about malaria, dengue, and Zika on social media.

The numbers are the point. The WHO estimates malaria alone kills over 600,000 people per year, mostly children under 5 in Sub-Saharan Africa. Adding dengue, Zika, yellow fever, West Nile, and chikungunya pushes the total past 700,000 annually. Guinness World Records lists the mosquito as the deadliest animal known to humans. For context: sharks kill about 10 people a year; snakes kill around 50,000; other humans kill ~400,000.

In everyday texting, though, 🦟 rarely carries that weight. It's the bug ruining your camping trip, the 3am buzzing near your ear, or the person at the party who won't leave you alone.

Two completely separate user bases drive 🦟's usage.

Public-health lane. The WHO, Gates Foundation, Malaria No More, and CDC accounts use 🦟 to tag malaria-prevention posts, World Mosquito Day (August 20), and vaccine updates. It's literally why the emoji exists.

Complaint lane. Everyone else. Camping posts, backyard BBQ gripes, travel warnings about dengue zones, and the universal 'heard one buzzing at 3am, now I'm awake' tweet. In relationship slang, 🦟 has started showing up to describe people who can't take a hint.

Usage spikes every summer in the Northern Hemisphere, especially June through September. Health-advocacy accounts spike again in the fall when dengue cases peak in Southeast Asia and Central America.

🦟 was approved in Unicode 11.0 on June 5, 2018. The 2017 proposal (L2/17-268) was authored by the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Rare among emoji proposals, the case wasn't 'people want to use this,' it was 'public-health organizations need this to do their jobs.'

The proposal argued that social-media campaigns about malaria, dengue, and Zika were measurably weaker without a mosquito emoji. Health comms professionals were making do with 🐝, 🐛, or stock illustrations, none of which read clearly. Once 🦟 shipped, the WHO and Gates Foundation integrated it into their standard posting vocabulary almost overnight.

Apple's first version (iOS 12.1, 2018) had an anatomical error: only five legs instead of six. The correction came in iOS 13.1 (2019), which added the missing leg. Samsung and Google got it right the first time.

1. 2017Johns Hopkins CCP and the Gates Foundation submit [Unicode proposal L2/17-268](https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17268-mosquito-emoji.pdf) for a mosquito emoji.↗
2. 2018Approved as U+1F99F MOSQUITO in [Unicode 11.0 (June 5, 2018)](https://emojipedia.org/mosquito).↗
3. 2018Apple ships 🦟 in iOS 12.1 with only 5 legs (missing one). The anatomical error becomes minor social-media discourse.
4. 2019Apple fixes the 5-leg issue in iOS 13.1, making the mosquito anatomically correct with 6 legs.
5. 2021WHO recommends the first malaria vaccine, RTS,S/AS01 (Mosquirix), for children in Sub-Saharan Africa. 🦟 appears in WHO social posts.↗
6. 2023WHO recommends the second malaria vaccine, R21/Matrix-M, with roll-out in Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Kenya.
7. 2025[Guinness World Records formally confirms the Anopheles mosquito as the world's deadliest animal](https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2025/7/what-is-the-worlds-deadliest-animal) in a widely shared article that puts 🦟 back in circulation.

• •Mosquitoes kill an estimated 700,000 to 1 million people per year through malaria, dengue, Zika, yellow fever, and other diseases. Sharks kill ~10, snakes ~50,000. Mosquitoes win by orders of magnitude.
• •🦟 was proposed by Johns Hopkins and the Gates Foundation specifically to help public-health campaigns. Few emoji have an explicit humanitarian origin story.
• •Only female mosquitoes bite. They need blood proteins to produce eggs. Males feed on plant nectar and are harmless to humans.
• •The iconic whining buzz comes from wings beating 300 to 600 times per second. Fast enough that human ears register it as a single tone rather than a flap.
• •Apple's iOS 12.1 🦟 shipped with only 5 legs instead of 6. Fixed in iOS 13.1, but the missing-leg bug is still a common emoji-trivia answer.
• •Mosquitoes can detect CO2 from up to 164 feet (50 meters) away. They find you because you exhale, not because of perfume.
• •World Mosquito Day (August 20) marks Sir Ronald Ross's 1897 discovery that mosquitoes transmit malaria. He won the 1902 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the finding.
• •WHO recommended the first-ever malaria vaccine (RTS,S/AS01, Mosquirix) in 2021. A second vaccine (R21/Matrix-M) followed in 2023. Both target Plasmodium falciparum, the deadliest malaria parasite.

• •Jurassic Park (1993). The mosquito-in-amber plot device is one of the most famous science-fiction tropes of the 20th century. 🦟🦖 is shorthand for 'ancient DNA.'
• •Winnie the Pooh & Eeyore. A.A. Milne's stories include extended complaints about summer mosquitoes in the Hundred Acre Wood, a cultural reference point across English-speaking kids' lit.
• •The Ig Nobel Prize-winning research on mosquito attraction to Limburger cheese (and human feet) is regularly re-shared on Twitter with 🦟 captions.
• •The Mosquito Coast (Paul Theroux, 1981; Harrison Ford film, 1986; Apple TV+ series, 2021) gave the emoji a literary halo.
• •The CDC's Zika response (2016) predated the emoji by two years but made 'mosquito-borne disease' a household phrase in North America.

• •🦟 is U+1F99FU+1F99F, Unicode 11.0 (2018). CLDR name: mosquito.
• •Common shortcodes: :mosquito::mosquito: (Slack, Discord, GitHub).
• •Old Apple devices may still render the 5-leg iOS 12.1 version. Modern devices use the corrected 6-leg glyph from iOS 13.1+.
• •HTML entity: 🦟🦟 or 🦟🦟. URL-encoded: %F0%9F%A6%9F%F0%9F%A6%9F.

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