Octopus Emoji

A pink, red, or orange octopus with eight tentacles, usually drawn in a cartoon suction-cup style. Emojipedia notes vendors typically show two eyes and a rounded mantle, closer to a children's book octopus than a real cephalopod.

🐙 is probably the most culturally upgraded animal emoji of the last decade. Before 2020, it was mostly shorthand for 'ocean' or 'busy' (eight arms = multitasking). Then Netflix released My Octopus Teacher in September 2020, the film won Best Documentary at the 2021 Oscars, and suddenly the octopus became the internet's favorite alien. Peter Godfrey-Smith's Other Minds and Sy Montgomery's The Soul of an Octopus became bestseller reference points. 🐙 started showing up next to 'consciousness,' 'intelligence,' and 'alien' in a way no other animal emoji does.

Today the emoji carries at least five active meanings: ocean content, multitasking, 'alien mind' (smart, weird, distributed), octopus hugs, and Japanese food (takoyaki, タコ). On GitHub, 🐙 doubles as a stand-in for the Octocat mascot, which makes it a common emoji in dev Slack channels.

🐙 gets used in four main lanes.

Multitasking. 'Juggling 8 things 🐙' is the most common figurative use. Parent of toddlers, founder wearing six hats, nurse with five patients. The eight-arms visual makes the metaphor land instantly.

Ocean + octopus intelligence. Aquarium content, marine documentaries, and anything riffing on octopus consciousness. The 'three hearts, blue blood, nine brains' fact is such reliable viral content it practically qualifies as a TikTok genre.

Hug metaphor. 'Send you an octopus hug 🐙' means eight-arm, full-body squeeze. Surprisingly common in long-distance friend and partner DMs.

Japanese food and GitHub. 🐙 + 🍣 signals takoyaki, tako nigiri, or any tako dish. On dev Twitter and Slack, 🐙 leans GitHub-adjacent thanks to the Octocat. Pull request channels sometimes adopt it as a custom reaction.

The spiral shell, fish, and octopus all arrived together in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as part of the initial batch of marine life emojis carried over from Japanese mobile carriers. Tako (octopus, タコ) was common in Japanese keyboards because of takoyaki culture and the long Japanese tradition of octopus in food, folk tales, and art.

The cultural reframing was gradual, then sudden. For most of the 2010s, 🐙 was a generic 'ocean' emoji, no different in connotation from 🐠 or 🦑. Three things changed that.

First, Peter Godfrey-Smith's Other Minds (2016) and Sy Montgomery's The Soul of an Octopus (2015) hit the general-reader nonfiction chart at roughly the same time and cemented the 'octopus as alien consciousness' framing. Godfrey-Smith's line that meeting an octopus is 'probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien' became widely quoted.

Second, Paul the Octopus had already made international news in 2010 by correctly predicting 12 out of 14 World Cup matches at a German aquarium. His death in October 2010 became a minor news event. That made 🐙 personality-bearing in a way most animal emojis weren't.

Third, My Octopus Teacher (Netflix, Sept 2020) arrived at the peak of pandemic lockdowns and became a global phenomenon. Google search for 'my octopus teacher' spiked from 0 to 56 in Q4 2020 and hit another peak at the April 2021 Oscars. The film won Best Documentary Feature. After that, 🐙 stopped being a generic sea emoji and started being a character.

The GitHub connection is separate. Designer Simon Oxley created the Octocat mascot, and he's the same designer who made the original Twitter bird. GitHub's logo has made 🐙 a common substitute for 'this is a code thing' in dev chat.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F419U+1F419 OCTOPUS. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. Earlier vendor designs had more stylized, almost-cute renderings (Apple's iconic pink octopus face), while Google's Noto Color Emoji redesign in Android 10 made it slightly more realistic. Microsoft's Fluent design leans toward a jellyfish-octopus hybrid with flowing tentacles.

• •Octopuses have three hearts and blue blood. Two hearts pump blood through the gills, one pumps it to the body. The main heart actually stops beating when they swim, which is why they prefer crawling.
• •An octopus has around 500 million neurons, two-thirds of which are in the arms. Peter Godfrey-Smith argues octopus arms have 'partly autonomous' cognition, something no other animal is structured like.
• •Paul the Octopus correctly predicted 12 of 14 World Cup matches in 2010 at Sea Life Oberhausen. Spanish PM Zapatero offered him state protection. Paul died four months after the final.
• •My Octopus Teacher won the 2021 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. It's credited with single-handedly creating 'octopus content' as a TikTok genre.
• •GitHub's Octocat mascot was designed by Simon Oxley, who also designed the original Twitter bird. Two of the most recognized mascots in tech, same artist.
• •Octopuses can squeeze through any gap their beak fits through. A giant pacific octopus can fit through a hole the size of an orange.
• •Peter Godfrey-Smith's Other Minds calls the octopus 'probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien,' a line quoted so often it's practically octopus fandom's mission statement.
• •Ringo Starr wrote 'Octopus's Garden' in 1968 after a Sardinian boat captain told him octopuses collect shiny objects and arrange them outside their dens. Octopuses do, in fact, build shell-and-junk 'gardens' near their homes.

• •My Octopus Teacher (2020): Craig Foster's year-long relationship with a wild common octopus in a South African kelp forest. Netflix global hit, Oscar Best Documentary 2021, endorsed by Amy Schumer to her 10M+ followers, single-handedly repositioned 🐙 as a character rather than a creature.
• •Paul the Octopus (2010 World Cup): At Sea Life Oberhausen, Paul predicted 12 of 14 World Cup matches correctly (including the Spain win in the final) by choosing between two flag-labeled boxes. Spanish PM Zapatero offered him state protection. Ahmadinejad called him a 'symbol of Western decadence.' Paul died that October. Still the gold standard for sports-predicting animals.
• •Octopus's Garden (The Beatles, 1969): Ringo Starr wrote Octopus's Garden after a boat captain told him octopuses collect shiny objects and arrange them outside their dens. Covered by The Muppets three times. In (500) Days of Summer, a character calls it 'the greatest Beatles song ever.'
• •GitHub Octocat: The Octocat is a cat-octopus hybrid designed by Simon Oxley, who also designed the original Twitter bird. It's one of tech's most recognized mascots and a big reason dev Slack channels use 🐙 for code-related reactions.
• •Other Minds (Godfrey-Smith, 2016) & The Soul of an Octopus (Montgomery, 2015): Two books that reframed octopuses as 'the closest we'll come to meeting an intelligent alien.' Both bestsellers, both still cited in octopus content. Godfrey-Smith's Other Minds argues octopus arms have 'partly autonomous' cognition.
• •Hokusai's The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (1814): Hokusai's woodblock print is one of the most discussed pieces of Japanese shunga art and is often cited as a root of tentacle-themed imagery in manga and anime.