Palms Up Together Emoji

Two palms held together, facing upward, as if receiving something or making a prayer of supplication. In Islamic prayer (dua), this is the position for asking God for something: palms up, open, receiving. The gesture is theorized to begin as a request for empty hands to be filled by divine beneficence.

Before 🤲 existed, Muslims had no emoji for their prayer gesture. 🙏 shows pressed-together hands (the Christian/Buddhist prayer position, or Japanese gratitude gesture), not palms-up (Islamic supplication). Arabic and Urdu-speaking Twitter users rarely used 🙏 during Ramadan because of its association with non-Muslim prayer traditions. 🤲 filled that gap when it arrived in Unicode 10.0 (2017).

The gesture carries meaning well beyond religion. In body language research, palm-up gestures are among the most common human gestures: a study of 8,000 gestures from 129 speakers found palm-up forms accounted for 24% of all gestures produced. The researchers identified a kernel meaning of "absence of knowledge" or "nothing to hide." Showing open palms upward signals vulnerability, honesty, and supplication, whether you're asking God, asking a friend, or asking a stranger for directions.

Approved in Unicode 10.0 (2017) as U+1F932U+1F932 PALMS UP TOGETHER. Part of proposal L2/16-308 by Peter Edberg (Apple, Emoji Subcommittee), which included 10 hand gesture emojis.

🤲 splits into religious and secular lanes, and the split is clean.

The religious lane is the original: dua supplication. "Please God 🤲" or "Making dua 🤲" or simply 🤲 after sharing a prayer request. During Ramadan and Eid, 🤲 appears alongside 🌙 (crescent moon), ☪️ (star and crescent), and 📿 (prayer beads) in Muslim social media posts. It's the prayer emoji that actually looks like Muslim prayer.

The secular lane is broader: asking, receiving, offering, begging. "Give me 🤲" or "Waiting for my paycheck 🤲" or "Drop it in my hands 🤲" treats the cupped palms as a receiving gesture. It works for playful requests ("Compliments, please 🤲"), sincere gratitude ("Receiving blessings 🤲"), and the "hand it over" meme format.

Dictionary.com notes that when used by Muslims or people of other faiths, 🤲 overlaps with 🙏, and the two often appear together in the same message. The distinction is subtle but real: 🙏 is pressing your palms together (gratitude, please, thank you). 🤲 is opening your palms upward (receiving, asking, supplication). One closes. The other opens.

🤲 arrived as part of a broader push for emoji diversity. In 2016-2017, Unicode was expanding representation: the hijab emoji was proposed by Rayouf Alhumedhi, a 15-year-old Saudi girl living in Berlin, who argued that 550 million Muslim women who wear hijab had "not a single space on the keyboard" reserved for them. The palms-up-together emoji came from a related impulse: Muslims had no prayer emoji that matched their prayer gesture.

The proposal (L2/16-308), submitted by Peter Edberg of Apple on behalf of the Emoji Subcommittee, included 10 hand gesture emojis. 🤲 was one of them. It was approved in Unicode 10.0 (2017) and released with Emoji 5.0.

The gesture itself dates to early Islam. In hadith tradition, the Prophet Muhammad performed dua with both hands raised, palms facing the sky, at shoulder or chest level. The position expresses humility, neediness, and deference to God. Some scholars distinguish orientation: palms facing up when asking for something to be given, palms facing down when asking for tribulation to be lifted. The exception is the rain prayer (salat al-istisqa'), where palms face downward.

But the palm-up gesture predates Islam by millennia. A 2018 study in Frontiers in Communication by Cooperrider, Abner, and Goldin-Meadow analyzed the gesture across spoken languages and sign languages worldwide. They found palm-up forms account for 24% of all gestures humans produce, making it one of the most common nonverbal forms in existence. The kernel meaning: "I have nothing, I know nothing, I'm showing you my empty hands." From that root grew prayer (asking God to fill them), supplication (asking anyone for help), honesty (showing you have nothing to hide), and uncertainty (the palms-up shrug).

🤲 sits at a cultural crossroads.

For Muslims, it's unmistakably dua. The gesture appears in mosque, in prayer spaces, and throughout Islamic art. During Ramadan, 🤲 floods social media in Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, Turkish, and Indonesian posts. A Prismoji analysis of Ramadan tweets found that Arabic and Urdu-speaking users rarely used 🙏 because it evoked non-Muslim prayer traditions. 🤲 gave them a culturally accurate alternative.

In Western/secular contexts, 🤲 reads as "give me" or "receiving." The religious significance fades. A non-Muslim user sending 🤲💰 ("pay me") probably isn't thinking about dua. This dual reading can create awkwardness: using 🤲 flippantly ("Give me pizza 🤲") in a conversation with someone who associates it with sacred prayer could feel disrespectful, even if that wasn't the intent.

In Japanese culture, cupped hands are part of Shinto shrine purification rituals: water is ladled into cupped palms for rinsing the mouth. The gesture carries reverence, not casualness. In courtroom traditions worldwide, witnesses raise open palms during oaths, tapping into the same ancient trust signal.

In ASL (American Sign Language), open hands moving outward can represent "open" or "book" (miming opening a book's covers). But this is a different hand position from 🤲, where palms face up rather than outward.

• •🤲 was part of proposal L2/16-308, submitted by Peter Edberg (Apple) on behalf of the Emoji Subcommittee. The proposal included 10 hand gesture emojis in one batch.
• •Before 🤲, Arabic and Urdu-speaking Muslims avoided 🙏 during Ramadan because it looked like non-Muslim prayer. 🤲 was the first emoji to accurately represent the dua supplication position.
• •A 2018 academic study found palm-up gestures account for 24% of all gestures humans produce, making the form behind 🤲 one of the most common nonverbal signals in existence.
• •🤲 arrived in the same Unicode era as the hijab emoji, which was proposed by a 15-year-old Saudi girl named Rayouf Alhumedhi. Both were part of a broader push for Muslim representation in emoji.
• •In Islamic tradition, the orientation of palms during dua matters. Palms up = asking for something to be given. Palms down = asking for tribulation to be lifted. The rain prayer uses palms-down, the opposite of the usual form.
• •In Japanese Shinto purification rituals, water is ladled into cupped hands for rinsing the mouth. Same gesture, sacred context, completely different tradition.
• •Dictionary.com's entry describes 🤲 as a gesture "theorized to begin as a request for empty hands to be filled by divine beneficence." That's one of the most elegant emoji descriptions in the dictionary.

• •The biggest risk: using 🤲 flippantly ("gimme pizza 🤲") in a conversation with someone who associates it with sacred dua prayer. The sacred and the casual readings of 🤲 coexist but don't always mix well.
• •Confusing 🤲 with 🙏. They're different prayer traditions. 🙏 presses palms together. 🤲 opens palms upward. Using the wrong one in a religious context signals unfamiliarity with the tradition.
• •Some non-Muslim users read 🤲 as begging or panhandling, which can carry negative connotations. In a dua context, the gesture is about humility before God, not need before people.

• •Part of the Muslim emoji representation wave (2017) — 🤲 arrived in the same Unicode release as the broader push for Muslim representation. The hijab emoji was proposed that same era by Rayouf Alhumedhi, a 15-year-old Saudi girl who argued that 550 million hijab-wearing women had no emoji representation. 🤲 addressed the prayer gap: Muslims had no emoji that matched their dua position.
• •Ramadan social media — During Ramadan, 🤲 appears in millions of posts alongside 🌙 and ☪️. A Prismoji analysis of Ramadan tweets found Arabic and Urdu speakers avoided 🙏 because it evoked non-Muslim prayer. 🤲 gave them a culturally accurate emoji for the first time.
• •The academic palm-up study — Cooperrider, Abner, and Goldin-Meadow published "The Palm-Up Puzzle" in Frontiers in Communication (2018), analyzing why the palm-up gesture appears in every studied spoken language and sign language. They found it accounts for 24% of all gestures and carries a kernel meaning of "absence of knowledge." The emoji 🤲 is a digital version of one of humanity's most fundamental nonverbal forms.

• •Codepoint: U+1F932U+1F932. Unicode name: PALMS UP TOGETHER. Part of Unicode 10.0 (2017), Emoji 5.0.
• •Skin tone modifiers supported: U+1F932 U+1F3FBU+1F932 U+1F3FB through U+1F932 U+1F3FFU+1F932 U+1F3FF. All six variants (default + five tones) available since launch.
• •Common shortcodes: :palms_up_together::palms_up_together: (Slack, Discord, GitHub). Some platforms also accept :palms_up::palms_up:.
• •Design varies by platform: Apple shows more cupped hands; Google's design is flatter. Test rendering across devices if the exact visual matters for your UI.

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