Person Cartwheeling Emoji

A person mid-cartwheel, limbs splayed like the spokes of a wheel. 🤸 was approved in Unicode 9.0 (2016) as PERSON DOING CARTWHEEL and has been busy ever since. The literal meaning is gymnastics, but the figurative meaning took over almost immediately: "doing cartwheels" as shorthand for uncontainable excitement. You didn't actually flip over. You just felt like you could.

The word "cartwheel" dates to the late 14th century, originally the wheel of a cart. The acrobatic sense only shows up in 1861, named because the move mimics a spoke rotating around an axle. Germans call it Radschlag, "wheel strike," and Düsseldorf has held competitive cartwheel tournaments since the Middle Ages. Kids there still earn pocket money by doing cartwheels for tourists.

On phones today, 🤸 works as a full-body exclamation point. It's bigger than 🎉 because it involves your whole self, smaller than 🥳 because it isn't a party, and more physical than 😆 because you're actually moving. When someone sends "got the apartment 🤸," you can feel the flip.

🤸 has three major lanes online. First, literal gymnastics and cheerleading content, especially during Olympic cycles. Simone Biles' Paris 2024 comeback, where she won four medals including team, all-around, and vault gold, put the gymnastics emoji back in heavy rotation. Biles became the first woman since Vera Čáslavská (1964-68) to win two non-consecutive Olympic all-around golds. Gymnastics fan accounts lean on 🤸 the way baseball fans lean on ⚾.

Second, figurative celebration. "Got the job 🤸," "Friday finally 🤸," "last day of exams 🤸." This use dominates Gen Z messaging because the emoji feels playful without being cutesy, and it maps onto the English phrase "doing cartwheels" that everyone already uses verbally.

Third, the Philippine "Beshy" meme that went mainstream in June 2023. "Beshy" (Tagalog slang for "bestie") paired with a cartwheel became a Filipino-TikTok shorthand for friend-group hype, and the emoji spiked globally as the audio traveled. Our family trends data shows 🤸 hitting a quarterly peak of 43 in Q3 2023, more than triple any other activity emoji in the same set.

On TikTok and Instagram, fitness creators pair it with 💪 and 🔥 for workout-win posts. On X, it skews metaphorical. In Slack, it's a safe celebration emoji: excited but not unhinged.

🤸 skews hard friendly. It's enthusiasm, not seduction. Where 😏 or 😘 carry romantic weight, the cartwheel is too busy being excited to sit still long enough to flirt. The exception is phrase-driven: "you make me 🤸" reads as butterflies. Read the sentence, not just the emoji.

• •Friendly when reacting to general good news
• •Flirty only in explicit constructions like "you make me 🤸"
• •Most common pairing is 🎉 or ✨, both neutral
• •Never romantic when replacing a neutral reaction emoji

Person Cartwheeling was proposed to the Unicode Consortium in 2014 as part of a sports emoji expansion. It was approved in Unicode 9.0 in June 2016 and added to Emoji 3.0 the same year. Gender variants 🤸‍♂️ and 🤸‍♀️ arrived in Emoji 4.0 (late 2016) via ZWJ sequences.

The cartwheel itself has a documented sporting history going back at least 1,300 years. In Düsseldorf, Germany, children have reportedly performed cartwheels for tourists since the 13th century, a tradition that became so cultural that the city's logo is a stylized cartwheel. Düsseldorf hosts the annual Radschlägerturnier, a cartwheel competition that's been running for over 50 years and draws hundreds of kids.

The emoji design was unusual in one respect: it was always intended to be depicted mid-motion, not static like most activity emojis. Apple, Google, and Samsung all chose to freeze a different moment in the rotation, which is why the emoji looks slightly different across platforms. Apple picks the peak of the inversion; Google catches the pre-push phase; Samsung lands closer to the finish.

1. 2016Person Cartwheeling approved in Unicode 9.0 / Emoji 3.0↗
2. 2016Gender variants 🤸‍♂️ and 🤸‍♀️ added in Emoji 4.0
3. 2019Apple iOS 13.2 refines the mid-rotation pose for better motion clarity↗
4. 2023Filipino "Beshy" TikTok meme sends global search volume to a Q3 peak
5. 2024Simone Biles' Paris 2024 gymnastics comeback drives a second usage bump↗

In Germany, the cartwheel is a minor national symbol. Düsseldorf's coat of arms-adjacent emblem includes a cartwheeling child, and locals call kids doing cartwheels for cash "Radschläger." The German word Radschlag is used for both the move and the figurative sense of "a quick turnaround," which carries over to the emoji.

In the Philippines, 🤸 carries Beshy-meme weight. Tagalog "beshy" (bestie) paired with the emoji became a TikTok staple in 2023, and Filipino users often read the emoji first as friend-hype rather than celebration. If you drop 🤸 in a Filipino group chat, expect "beshyyyy" responses.

In the US, the emoji is heavily associated with gymnastics culture thanks to athletes like Simone Biles, Sunisa Lee, and Jordan Chiles. US gymnastics accounts use it as a shorthand for routines, meets, and tumbling passes.

In Japan, cartwheels (側転 "sokuten") are a common PE class move. The emoji carries school-sport connotations more than celebration, and you'll see it more often in practice-update posts than party contexts. In Brazil, it connects to capoeira (the aú is a cartwheel variant) and shows up in martial arts content.

• •The word "cartwheel" meant a wheel on a cart from the late 14th century and only picked up its acrobatic meaning in 1861, when the move was named for looking like spokes rotating around an axle.
• •Germans call the move Radschlag, literally "wheel strike." Düsseldorf has had competitive cartwheel tournaments since the Middle Ages.
• •Simone Biles' Paris 2024 comeback made her the first woman since 1968 to win two non-consecutive Olympic all-around titles, and the most decorated American gymnast in Olympic history.
• •The Filipino "Beshy" TikTok trend in mid-2023 drove 🤸 to a normalized Google Trends score of 43, the single biggest quarterly usage spike in the activity-emoji family's six-year history.
• •Capoeira's aú, a foundational move, is essentially a slow cartwheel. Brazilian capoeiristas pair 🤸 with 🎶 in training clips.
• •Skin-tone support was added to 🤸 in Emoji 4.0 (late 2016) along with the gender variants, which is why older devices sometimes fall back to a yellow default.

• •Some people read 🤸 as sarcastic because the body language is so extreme. It isn't. The emoji almost always reads as sincere enthusiasm.
• •A small minority of users interpret it as dance rather than gymnastics. That's not wrong in capoeira contexts, but for most conversations, it's acrobatics.

• •Simone Biles at Paris 2024 (olympics.com): four medals including all-around gold, making her the most decorated American gymnast in Olympic history with eight career medals.
• •Düsseldorf's Radschlägerturnier (duesseldorf.de): an annual cartwheel competition running over 50 years, where kids spin along a marked course for time and distance.
• •Filipino "Beshy" TikTok meme (June 2023): cartwheel emoji becomes shorthand for "bestie, YES" energy in Tagalog-speaking communities, driving the largest single Google Trends spike on record for the emoji.
• •The cartwheel as a capoeira move (aú): in Afro-Brazilian capoeira, the aú is a foundational movement, and capoeiristas often pair 🤸 with 🎶 and 🇧🇷 in training clips.

• •Base codepoint: U+1F938. Skin tone modifiers supported (U+1F3FB to U+1F3FF).
• •Gender variants are ZWJ sequences: U+1F938 + U+200D + U+2642/U+2640 + U+FE0F. On older platforms that don't support ZWJ, the variant falls back to 🤸 + ♂️ or 🤸 + ♀️.
• •Part of the Emoji 3.0 (2016) sports expansion along with 🤹 juggling, 🤼 wrestling, 🤽 water polo, 🤾 handball, and 🤺 fencing.
• •Slack shortcode: :person_doing_cartwheel::person_doing_cartwheel: or :cartwheel::cartwheel:. Discord: :person_cartwheeling::person_cartwheeling:.

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