People Wrestling Emoji

Two people in singlets locked up in a wrestling stance, one red, one blue, mirroring Olympic corner assignments. 🤼 was approved in Unicode 9.0 (2016) as WRESTLERS and added to Emoji 3.0. It's one of the very few activity emojis that shows two humans in the same glyph, which is why it gets pulled into every "two-sided struggle" metaphor you can think of.

The literal reading is the sport. The figurative reading is anything where two parties are locked in. Sibling fights over the TV remote, your brain arguing with itself over Postmates, Marketing vs. Engineering over the quarterly budget, a friend and their ex circling each other at a wedding. When the situation needs two figures and a grip, 🤼 is the only activity emoji that delivers.

The gender-neutral base also does diplomatic work. 🤼‍♀️ reads as women wrestling; 🤼‍♂️ reads as men wrestling. 🤼 leaves gender out of it, which is why it's the natural choice when you just want the idea of two opposing forces without coloring them. Emoji 17.0 (2025) added multi-skin-tone support, so each of the two figures can now carry a different modifier.

🤼 splits into three main uses online. First, professional wrestling fandom. WWE, AEW, NJPW, and the indie scene all lean on it. Event nights (WrestleMania, Royal Rumble, Wrestle Kingdom) send usage vertical, and during WWE's Women's Revolution era (2015-2019) 🤼 became shorthand for "tune in, they're doing something historic tonight." Becky Lynch's 2019 WrestleMania main-event win was 🤼 Twitter's biggest night.

Second, Olympic wrestling, especially freestyle. Paris 2024 men's and women's freestyle drew huge engagement, and the sport's oldest-Olympic-event status (Ancient Games 708 BC, modern Games 1896) gives it a historical weight few sport emojis carry.

Third, and most common in everyday chat: metaphorical grappling. "Me and my deadline right now 🤼," "wrestling with this decision 🤼," "when Target employees see me coming 🤼." The emoji is one of the most-used "internal conflict" visuals in Gen Z messaging because it captures two-sidedness that 💀 😩 or 🤯 can't. Slack sees it around contested priorities: "eng vs. design on this PR 🤼" diffuses tension by framing the disagreement as playful.

🤼 is one of the least romantic emojis in the activity block. Wrestling is conflict, not flirtation. The only flirty read is playful back-and-forth: "we were wrestling over the check 🤼" frames a date as spirited. Otherwise it's pure competition, argument, or sport.

• •🤼 alone = competition, argument, or actual wrestling
• •🤼😂 = play-fighting, could be flirty banter
• •🤼💕 = rare combo that signals "we fight but I love it"
• •🤼🔔 = declaring a new round of the current spat

Wrestling is arguably the oldest sport on earth. Cave paintings in the Lascaux caves of France (~15,000 BC) show humans grappling. The Sumerians documented wrestling rules around 3,000 BC. In ancient Greece, pale (wrestling) was one of the original Olympic events in 708 BC and one of the five pentathlon sports.

The WRESTLERS emoji was approved in Unicode 9.0 / Emoji 3.0 in 2016 as part of a sports expansion. It was unusual from the start: most activity emojis show one person, but wrestling by definition needs two. The design (two figures in different-colored singlets) had to establish that this wasn't a handshake or an embrace but a locked-up grappling stance. Apple, Google, and Samsung all settled on a similar approach, with the red/blue singlets echoing the actual color conventions of Olympic wrestling where competitors are assigned red or blue corners.

Gender variants followed in Emoji 4.0 (late 2016): 🤼‍♀️ (women wrestling) and 🤼‍♂️ (men wrestling) as ZWJ sequences. In 2025, Emoji 17.0 added the ability to assign different skin tones to each of the two figures, a technically tricky expansion that made the codepoint sequence significantly longer.

1. 2016WRESTLERS approved in Unicode 9.0 / Emoji 3.0, showing two people in singlets↗
2. 2016Gender variants 🤼‍♀️ and 🤼‍♂️ added in Emoji 4.0↗
3. 2019Apple iOS 13.2 refines wrestling pose for clearer grappling stance↗
4. 2025Emoji 17.0 adds multi-skin-tone support: each figure can now carry a separate modifier

In the United States, 🤼 covers both amateur/Olympic wrestling and the WWE entertainment complex. Wrestling is a mainstream high school and college sport, with strong programs at Iowa, Penn State, and Oklahoma State. WWE is global entertainment, culturally larger than the actual sport.

In Japan, the emoji connects to Olympic freestyle (where Kaori Icho won four consecutive golds, 2004-2016) and to sumo. Sumo is unrelated anatomically but emotionally linked as "the national wrestling." Professional sumo still bans women from the ring based on Shinto purity traditions.

In Iran, Turkey, and Central Asia, wrestling (kushti, güreş, koshti) is a centuries-old cultural sport with enormous prestige. Iran's men's freestyle team is a perennial Olympic medal threat. Turkey hosts the Kırkpınar oil wrestling festival, dating to 1362, one of the oldest continuously-run sports competitions in the world.

In Mongolia, Bökh (traditional wrestling) is one of the "three manly games" at the Naadam festival, alongside archery and horse racing. Mongolian wrestlers have dominated sumo for the past 20 years.

In Mexico, lucha libre is a cultural institution. The colorful masks and theatrical style give Mexican wrestling a visual identity the singlet-based emoji barely approximates. Luchadores are folk heroes.

In Senegal, lamb (traditional wrestling) is the most popular spectator sport, regularly drawing crowds of tens of thousands. Matches combine grappling with mystical rituals and praise singers. It's wrestling in a register Western audiences almost never see.

• •Wrestling appears on cave paintings in the Lascaux caves of France dating to roughly 15,000 BC, making it one of the oldest documented human sports.
• •The Kırkpınar oil wrestling festival in Turkey dates to 1362 and is one of the oldest continuously-held sports events in the world.
• •Women's freestyle wrestling didn't enter the Olympics until Athens 2004, 2,700 years after Spartan women grappled in the 9th century BC.
• •Kaori Icho's four consecutive Olympic golds (2004-2016) put her alongside Al Oerter, Carl Lewis, and Michael Phelps as athletes who won the same individual event at four straight Games.
• •At Paris 2024, Yui Susaki of Japan lost her first international match ever after an 83-0 career, eliminated in the round of 16 by a last-second takedown.
• •Emoji 17.0 (2025) made 🤼 multi-skin-tone. The ZWJ sequence for two differently-colored wrestlers is one of the longest in the emoji spec.

• •Some users use 🤼 thinking it means any fighting or combat. It specifically means grappling, not striking. Boxing is 🥊, martial arts is 🥋.
• •Sending 🤼 during a real argument can read as trivializing the conflict. Keep it for situations where the tone is clearly light.

• •WrestleMania 35 (2019) was the first WrestleMania where women main-evented, with Becky Lynch defeating Ronda Rousey and Charlotte Flair in a Winner Takes All triple threat match.
• •The Iron Claw (2023) starring Zac Efron told the tragic real story of the Von Erich wrestling family, and pulled a new audience into wrestling content.
• •GLOW (2017-2019) on Netflix fictionalized the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling) from the 1980s, winning two Emmys.
• •Kaori Icho of Japan won four consecutive Olympic golds (2004-2016), joining Al Oerter, Carl Lewis, and Michael Phelps as athletes who won the same individual event at four straight Games.
• •Kırkpınar, Turkey's oil wrestling festival, dates to 1362 and is one of the oldest continuously-held sports events on earth.

• •Base codepoint: U+1F93C. Emoji 17.0 (2025) introduced multi-skin-tone support; the full sequence with tones becomes U+1F93C + U+1F3FB + U+200D + U+1F3FD or similar.
• •Gender variants: U+1F93C U+200D U+2640 U+FE0FU+1F93C U+200D U+2640 U+FE0F (women) and U+1F93C U+200D U+2642 U+FE0FU+1F93C U+200D U+2642 U+FE0F (men). 4 codepoints for 1 glyph.
• •Slack shortcode: :people_wrestling::people_wrestling:. Discord: :people_wrestling::people_wrestling:.
• •Not all platforms render the multi-skin-tone expansion yet. Fall back gracefully; the base codepoint always works.

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