Orangutan Emoji

The orangutan emoji shows a shaggy, orange-haired great ape with the slightly bewildered expression that has made it an internet favorite. It's the only great ape that lives in trees, the only one native to Asia, and on most vendor designs it looks like it's mid-thought about something you don't want to hear about.

The name comes from Malay orang hutan, literally "person of the forest." Scholars used to credit Europeans with inventing the compound, but recent research on Old Javanese texts pushes the term back to the first millennium CE. So when you type 🦧, you're using a word Malay and Javanese speakers have used for the animal for more than a thousand years.

In texting the emoji lives three separate lives. It's the conservation signal for the three critically endangered species (Bornean, Sumatran, and Tapanuli). It's the mascot of the "Return to Monke" internet movement, which romanticizes rejecting modernity and going feral in the trees. And it inherits some of the same loaded history as 🐵, weaponized against Black people online, although the orangutan version shows up as abuse less often than the brown monkey because it's specifically red-haired.

🦧 has a smaller, nerdier audience than 🐒 or 🐵, and that's part of its charm. It attracts three specific crowds.

The conservation crowd. Zoos, wildlife orgs, and documentary fans use 🦧 for World Orangutan Day (August 19), International Orangutan Day, and to raise alarm about palm oil clearing forests at record pace. If an account posts 🦧🌴🚫🌴, they're probably asking you to check your snack ingredients.

The "return to monke" crowd. This is where 🦧 went viral. The meme, tracked by Know Your Meme and rooted in iFunny's mid-2018 ape obsession, romanticizes rejecting civilization. "Reject society, embrace monke 🦧." "No phone, no problem, return to monke 🦧🌴." The /r/ape subreddit grew from 329 to over 28,100 subscribers between April and June 2020 on the back of this. The orangutan specifically took over because of an older joke image ("Le Monke") of a confused-looking orangutan, plus its visual distinctiveness among the ape emojis.

Everyone else. Picture captions for zoo visits, red-hair self-deprecation (gingers have adopted 🦧 affectionately on TikTok), and the "I am too tired to think" mood. It also shows up in "just vibing" posts where the creator wants animal energy without the baggage of the plain monkey emoji.

The orangutan emoji was proposed in March 2018 by Charlotte Bushnell-Boates in a submission to the Unicode Technical Committee. The proposal argued the emoji was needed to represent a critically endangered species that had no dedicated character, despite strong Google search volume and cultural presence. The Unicode Consortium approved it for Unicode 12.0, released on March 5, 2019, alongside sloth, otter, skunk, and flamingo as part of a wildlife-heavy update.

The word "orangutan" itself has a longer and more contested history. Research published in 2020 in Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde used Old Javanese texts to argue that the term orang hutan ("person of the forest") was already used for the ape in the first millennium CE, centuries before European contact. English first recorded the term in 1693 as "Orang-Outang" in a medical text by physician John Bulwer.

Orangutans themselves are the only great apes native to Asia, and the only ones classified as the genus Pongo. Until 2017 scientists recognized two species. Then a team of Indonesian and international researchers described a third, Pongo tapanuliensis, the Tapanuli orangutan, in a paper in Current Biology. It's the rarest great ape on Earth, with fewer than 800 individuals. The emoji was approved two years later.

1. 2018Charlotte Bushnell-Boates submits orangutan emoji proposal to Unicode (L2/18-137)↗
2. 2019Approved in Unicode 12.0 / Emoji 12.0 on March 5, 2019 as U+1F9A7↗
3. 2020"Return to Monke" meme explodes on iFunny, Reddit, and TikTok; /r/ape grows from 329 to 28,100 subscribers in two months↗
4. 2022Apple redesigns orangutan for iOS 16 with softer cartoon shading; Samsung follows in One UI 5
5. 2023Tapanuli Orangutan featured as a flagship species in Mongabay's "newest great ape" reporting↗

In Indonesia and Malaysia, the orangutan is a national conservation symbol with heavy emotional weight. Sumatra and Borneo are the only places on Earth these apes still live wild, and palm oil deforestation has destroyed more than 80% of Bornean habitat in the last 20 years. Using 🦧 in Indonesian conservation contexts carries real political charge.

In the United States and Europe, 🦧 is mostly meme coded. "Return to monke" was a mostly-Western internet phenomenon. The conservation association is strong but secondary.

In online gaming and chan communities, the orangutan is the face of the "Le Monke" and "uh oh stinky" shitpost lineage. The emoji inherits those jokes. If you send it in a Discord full of gamers, expect them to read it as ironic.

On TikTok, 🦧 has become affectionate shorthand for people with red hair. The hashtag and comment usage surged in 2023 and 2024 as gingers reclaimed the comparison as cute rather than insulting.

Across all contexts, the racial-abuse shadow that hangs over 🐵 is less intense for 🦧, but it still exists. Monkey and ape emojis directed at Black people have been flagged as hate speech by Meta's Oversight Board. If you wouldn't say it out loud, don't send it.

• •Orangutans share 97% of their DNA with humans. That's less than chimps (99%) but still enough that they solve problems, deceive each other, and build new nests in the trees every single night.
• •There are three species of orangutan and all are critically endangered: Bornean (~104,000 left), Sumatran (~14,000), and Tapanuli (<800).
• •Wild orangutans at Suaq Balimbing in Sumatra use sticks to extract honey and ants, manipulate vines to swing across canopy gaps, and fashion leaf gloves to handle prickly fruits. The same tools aren't used by populations just a few hundred kilometers away, which primatologists interpret as cultural transmission.
• •Male Bornean orangutans can weigh up to 100 kg and develop large cheek pads ("flanges") at maturity. Flanged and unflanged males have different mating strategies, essentially two separate male roles in one species.
• •In 2014 a macaque in Indonesia grabbed photographer David Slater's camera and took a selfie. PETA sued on the monkey's behalf arguing for animal copyright. The case was dismissed and is now cited as precedent in AI copyright lawsuits.
• •The Orang Pendek, a cryptid described by Sumatran locals since the 1800s as a short upright ape, is usually dismissed as misidentified orangutans. But the Tapanuli orangutan discovery in 2017 proved that large Sumatran primates can, in fact, still hide from science.
• •Orangutans build a fresh sleeping nest in the trees every single night, and sometimes a second one for napping during the day. Infants watch their mothers for 6-7 years learning the technique before they're proficient.

• •King Louie in The Jungle Book (1967): Disney's King Louie is the most famous fictional orangutan in Western pop culture, even though orangutans aren't native to India where the film is set. The character has been criticized for racial coding in "I Wan'na Be Like You," and Disney+ added a content advisory warning in 2020. The 2016 live-action remake quietly changed the species to Gigantopithecus.
• •Clyde in Every Which Way But Loose (1978): The beer-drinking orangutan sidekick to Clint Eastwood's bare-knuckle trucker Philo Beddoe. The film made over $85 million (massive for 1978), briefly turning Clyde into one of the most recognized apes in America. The original Clyde, played by an orangutan named Manis, was replaced for the 1980 sequel because he grew too large.
• •The Librarian of Unseen University (1986): Terry Pratchett turned a Discworld wizard into an orangutan in The Light Fantastic, and the Librarian refused to be changed back because orangutan hands are great for climbing bookshelves. He communicates entirely through the words "Ook" and "Eek" and has become one of the most beloved characters in comic fantasy.
• •Rocky at Indianapolis Zoo mimics human speech (2016): Orangutan Rocky became a research star when scientists confirmed he could match pitch and tone of human researchers in "do as I do" vocal games. The study suggested the roots of human speech could be 10 million years old. Researchers nicknamed his signature sound the "wookie call" because it sounded like Chewbacca.
• •Dunston Checks In (1996): A Disney comedy centered on a trained orangutan named Dunston (real name Sam) causing chaos in a luxury hotel. Quietly one of the better orangutan performances on film.

• •Orangutan is U+1F9A7U+1F9A7 (E12.0, 2019). It's a solo character, no ZWJ sequences.
• •Shortcodes: :orangutan::orangutan: on Slack / Discord / GitHub. Not every older emoji library supports it, so test before shipping.
• •No skin tone modifiers apply to animal emojis. All orangutan renders are red/orange.
• •Vendor design varies: Apple, Google, and Samsung show a full body with face-forward pose; Microsoft's older designs (pre-Fluent) were more cartoonish. If you're rendering consistent app UI, supply your own asset.

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