Mouse Trap Emoji

🪤 is a spring-loaded wooden mouse trap with a wedge of cheese sitting on the bait tray. Approved in Unicode 13.0 (March 2020) from a proposal by Shirley Wang of Emojination (L2/19-144, filed March 2019). Very rarely used for literal pest control. Almost always shorthand for 'it's a trap,' bait, clickbait, a scam, a setup, or someone walking straight into a situation that looked too good to pass up.

The proposal explicitly argued that no existing emoji depicted 'entrapment' as a concept. That's the payload. When someone drops 🪤 in your replies, they're not warning you about mice, they're saying the thing in front of you is bait and you're the mouse.

🪤 lives in the comments, not the captions. You see it under suspicious DMs, fishy links, obvious rage-bait, catfishing warnings, too-good-to-be-true deals, and the exact moment someone realizes they've been played. On X, it clusters with 🚩 and ⚠️ as a flag-raising emoji, often paired with a quote-tweet of the evidence. On TikTok, it appears in stitch replies and 'storytime' setups where the narrator is about to reveal how they figured out their partner was lying. Gen Z uses it ironically too, tagging their own cringe impulse buys with 🪤 after the fact, as in 'they baited me, I ate it, now I'm $89 down and typing with sticky fingers.' It's less common in sincere or professional contexts, more common when the tone is knowing, sarcastic, or catching-someone-out.

The emoji came from proposal L2/19-144, submitted by Shirley Wang of Emojination on March 11, 2019. The pitch argued that 'mouse trap' returned almost 30 times more Google results than the committee's reference emoji benchmarks, that it represented a universal concept of entrapment no existing emoji covered, and that slapstick comedy (Tom and Jerry, Looney Tunes) had already made it globally legible. Unicode agreed. 🪤 shipped in Emoji 13.0 on March 10, 2020, alongside 🪣, 🪞, 🪟, 🪠, 🪡, and 🪢 as part of that year's household-object expansion.

The object itself is older. William C. Hooker patented the snap trap in Abingdon, Illinois in 1894 (US Patent 528,671). British inventor James Henry Atkinson followed in 1898 with the 'Little Nipper,' which is, incredibly, still a top-selling mouse trap today. The US Patent Office has issued over 4,400 patents for mouse traps, making it the most-invented device in American history.

1. 2019Shirley Wang of Emojination files proposal L2/19-144 on March 11
2. 2020Unicode 13.0 releases on March 10, adding 🪤 to the Miscellaneous Objects block
3. 2020Apple ships the emoji in iOS 14.2 (November) with a spring-loaded wooden base and wedge of cheddar
4. 2020Samsung (One UI 2.5), Google (Noto 12), and JoyPixels all ship their versions within months, most using the 'box propped up by a stick' cartoon style
5. 2023Microsoft Teams releases a 3D animated version where the bar actually snaps

• •Mice don't actually love cheese. Research from Manchester Metropolitan University found they prefer peanut butter, chocolate, and grains. House mice are also lactose intolerant, so a big wedge of cheddar can upset their digestion. The cheese myth mostly comes from cartoons.
• •The modern snap trap was patented by William C. Hooker in Abingdon, Illinois in 1894. His patent number was US 528,671. Everything since has been a variation on that one bar-and-spring design.
• •The mouse trap is the most-patented device in US history, with over 4,400 approved patents and thousands more rejected applications. The idiom 'build a better mousetrap' turned out to be unusually literal.
• •Ralph Waldo Emerson never wrote the 'better mousetrap' line. It was stitched together by Elbert Hubbard from an 1855 Emerson journal entry that listed 'corn, wood, boards, pigs, chairs, knives, crucibles, or church organs.' Hubbard swapped in 'mouse-trap' and attributed it to the dead guy.
• •Atkinson's 'Little Nipper,' patented in 1898, is still a top-selling mouse trap more than 125 years later. Very few consumer products have that kind of run.
• •Agatha Christie's play The Mousetrap opened in London in November 1952 and hit its 30,000th performance in March 2025. It paused only once, for 14 months during COVID. The ending is a closely guarded secret audiences are asked not to spoil.
• •Admiral Ackbar's 'It's a trap!' in Return of the Jedi (1983) was originally scripted as 'It's a trick!' The line was changed in post-production and went on to become one of the most-memed quotes of the internet era.
• •The 1963 Mouse Trap board game sold 1.2 million copies in its first year. Its Rube Goldberg contraption was designed by Ideal's Hank Kramer with Marvin Glass Associates.
• •American football has a defensive play called the 'mousetrap.' The O-line lets a defender through on purpose so a pulling guard can flatten him from the side as the running back cuts through the gap.

• •Admiral Ackbar, Return of the Jedi (1983). The 'It's a trap!' line, originally scripted as 'It's a trick!' and changed in post-production, became one of the most-memed quotes of the 2000s. Know Your Meme traces its online spread to the early 2000s image-macro era. 🪤 is the text-message shorthand for that scream.
• •Mouse Trap (Ideal, 1963). A Rube Goldberg contraption disguised as a children's board game. Designed by Marvin Glass's firm and Ideal's Hank Kramer, it sold 1.2 million copies in its first year and became a fixture of American rec rooms. If you're over 30, this is probably what the emoji looks like in your head.
• •The Mousetrap by Agatha Christie. Opened in London's West End in 1952 and has never stopped. The longest-running play in world history, it hit its 30,000th performance on March 19, 2025. Christie herself predicted it would close in eight months.
• •Tom and Jerry / Looney Tunes. Every gag where Tom rigs a trap with cheese and Jerry walks off with the cheese anyway. This is the source of the 'mice love cheese' myth that the emoji dutifully inherits.