Pancakes Emoji

🥞 is a tall stack of American-style pancakes with a pat of butter melting on top and, on some platforms, syrup running down the sides. It means breakfast, brunch, lazy mornings, comfort food, and the specific cozy feeling of eating carbs slowly while wearing something soft. Approved as part of Unicode 9.0 in 2016 alongside the rest of the breakfast-table cohort: 🥓 bacon, 🥚 egg, 🥛 glass of milk, and 🥐 croissant.

On most keyboards it's the only dedicated pancake glyph you get. That's doing a lot of lifting. The emoji is expected to cover everything from a British thin Shrove Tuesday pancake to a Russian blini, a French crêpe, a Japanese soufflé pancake, an Indian dosa, a Scottish drop scone, a Dutch poffertje, and the tall fluffy IHOP stack the Apple design actually depicts. People use it anyway. Context and caption do the disambiguation.

It also has a second life as a shorthand for flat, squashed, or demolished, which is where the TikTok "flat as a pancake" slang comes in. More on that below.

🥞 spikes hard on Saturday and Sunday mornings in North America, and again on Shrove Tuesday in the UK, Ireland, Australia, and Commonwealth countries, where Pancake Day is a cultural fixture. In Russia and much of Eastern Europe, Maslenitsa drives a full week of blini posting in February or March.

It works as a plain food tag ("brunch 🥞"), as a calendar hint ("Pancake Day 🥞"), and as a mood ("slow morning 🥞☕📖"). On TikTok the hashtag #pancakes is a high-volume lane for mini-cereal pancakes, soufflé builds, and flipping-gone-wrong clips. #pancakecereal alone collected over 941 million views after Sydney Melhoff posted the first version in April 2020.

In texting between friends and partners, 🥞 is mostly literal: "pancakes this weekend?" or a photo caption. In flirtier lanes it's also a soft invitation, the edible equivalent of "want to come over." It's a low-stakes emoji, no one is going to misread 🥞 as aggressive or sarcastic.

Pancakes are one of the oldest cooked foods on the planet. Ötzi the Iceman, the 5,300-year-old mummy found in the Alps, appears to have eaten something pancake-like shortly before he died. The traces of charcoal in his stomach suggest a batter cooked over an open fire.

The earliest written references come from the ancient Greeks around 500 BCE. The poet Cratinus describes a flat cake "hot and shedding morning dew." The Greeks called their version τηγανίτης (tēganitēs), from τάγηνον (tagēnon), "frying pan." It was wheat flour, olive oil, honey, and curdled milk, cooked on a hot pan and eaten for breakfast. Around the same time, millet pancakes were being made in what is now Xinjiang between 500 and 300 BCE, found in the Subeixi Cemeteries.

The English word "pancake" is medieval, first attested in the 15th century. The tradition of eating them on Shrove Tuesday is older than the word itself. Before Lent, households needed to use up the rich ingredients, eggs, milk, butter, and sugar, that were forbidden during the 40-day fast. Turning them into pancakes was a practical solution that became a religious and then secular tradition.

The Unicode 🥞 we use today is an American design choice. Apple, Google, Samsung, and Microsoft all render it as a tall IHOP-style stack with butter, even though pancakes worldwide are overwhelmingly thin. The "pan stack" won the emoji vote because Unicode proposals in 2015 came out of the US tech industry, and the US version of the pancake is the outlier, not the norm.

1. 2015Proposed in the 'Food for the breakfast table' cohort for Unicode 9.0, alongside bacon, egg, and glass of milk.
2. 2016Approved in Unicode 9.0 on 21 June 2016.↗
3. 2016First shipped on Twitter's Twemoji 2.1 in July, followed by Samsung TouchWiz 7.1 in September and Apple iOS 10.2 in December.
4. 2019Apple updates its design in iOS 13.3 to show maple syrup oozing down the sides, making the image more recognizable at small sizes.↗
5. 2020#pancakecereal goes viral in April as lockdown begins. The hashtag crosses 940 million views on TikTok within months.↗
6. 2025Pancakes On The Rocks in Sydney sets a new Guinness World Record with a 108.3cm pancake stack on 19 August.↗

• •Pancakes are older than writing. Ötzi the Iceman, who died around 3300 BCE, had traces of a pancake-like meal in his stomach.
• •The Olney pancake race in Buckinghamshire has been running since 1445. Since 1950 it has competed annually against Liberal, Kansas in a transatlantic flipping contest.
• •The tallest pancake stack is 108.3 cm, set by Pancakes On The Rocks in Sydney on 19 August 2025.
• •IHOP has raised over $24 million for charity through National Pancake Day since starting the tradition in 2006.
• •In 2025 IHOP served 25,629 pancakes in eight hours, a Guinness World Record that broke the previous mark of 17,182.
• •The Russian word blin (the singular of blini) is a common mild expletive in Russian, a softened substitute for a rude word, roughly equivalent to saying "damn" or "sugar" in English.
• •During Maslenitsa week Russians traditionally eat blini with every meal. The round golden shape symbolizes the sun at the end of winter.
• •Japanese soufflé pancakes use stiff-peak meringue folded into the batter, which is why they can stand 3-4 cm tall and wobble when moved. They have to be eaten fresh, they collapse within minutes.
• •Pancake cereal was invented on 21 April 2020 by TikTok creator Sydney Melhoff. The hashtag crossed 940 million views in about two months.

• •IHOP. The International House of Pancakes has run National Pancake Day every year since 2006 and is the real-world equivalent of the 🥞 emoji for most Americans.
• •Uncle Iroh, Avatar: The Last Airbender. Iroh's line about tea is iconic, but the show's pancake-making scenes became a 2020s comfort-viewing meme paired with 🥞.
• •Pancake (Emma Chamberlain's dog). YouTuber Emma Chamberlain's puppy Pancake became a mascot for a generation of vloggers, with 🥞 as the routine tag.
• •Leslie Knope, Parks and Recreation. Waffles were her signature, but the show's breakfast-food jokes helped cement the pancake-waffle cultural debate.
• •David Beckham on Pancake Day. The family pancake-flip clip is now an annual Instagram fixture, tagged 🥞 every February.
• •The Great British Bake Off. The pancake-day episodes drive the biggest UK emoji spike of the year outside of Christmas.