Pickle Emoji

[pickle] Pickle is a whole pickled cucumber, typically shown green and glossy, often with a single detached slice so you can see the cross-section and seeds. It covers the whole pickled-cucumber family: dill pickles (the default Western read), gherkins, cornichons, kosher half-sours, spicy and sour varieties. It doesn't cover 🥒 Cucumber (fresh, unpickled) or 🫑 Bell Pepper, which also sometimes gets pickled but isn't the emoji for the category.

The culinary gap is obvious: Unicode has 🥒, 🌶️, 🥬, 🥗, 🥪, 🍔, but no way to represent the pickle that shows up on most of them. The pitch for [pickle], per the Emojipedia proposal listing, also leaned on cultural weight: pickle's role in Jewish deli tradition, the dill-pickle potato chip industry, and the collateral pickleball explosion (24.3 million US players in 2025, up 171% in three years). The emoji was always going to inherit those metaphors whether Unicode wanted it to or not.

And the idiom baggage: "in a pickle" has been in English since 1562, predating Shakespeare's use of it in The Tempest. The original image was being as disoriented and soggy as a chopped vegetable floating in brine, an apt metaphor for a bad situation with no clear exit. Expect this idiomatic usage to swamp actual food-related uses within months of the emoji shipping.

The road to [pickle] was unusually bumpy. The codepoint U+1FADDU+1FADD was originally allocated to Apple Core during early Emoji 17.0 drafting. Apple Core was then deferred as Unicode questioned whether the use case was strong enough, and after review the concept was dropped entirely. The slot sat empty. In the 2025 candidate round, Unicode reassigned U+1FADDU+1FADD to Pickle as part of the Emoji 18.0 candidate set. The handoff is publicly visible in one place: Samsung's One UI 8.5 beta still renders the codepoint as the old Apple Core design, a mismatch that'll get patched before Emoji 18.0 ships.

1. 2023Apple Core is provisionally assigned codepoint U+1FADD on the early Emoji 17.0 draft list.
2. 2024Apple Core is deferred by the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee after the use case is deemed too narrow.
3. 2025Apple Core is dropped from consideration. Pickle is promoted into the U+1FADD slot as part of the Emoji 18.0 candidate round, per the [Emoji 18.0 draft list](https://www.unicode.org/emoji/emoji-candidates.html).
4. 2026Samsung's [One UI 8.5 beta](https://blog.emojipedia.org/samsung-one-ui-8-5-emoji-changelog/) ships with U+1FADD still rendered as an apple core, exposing the pre-ratification transition in a public build.
5. 2026Emoji 18.0 is targeted for ratification in September 2026. Vendor font support rolls out late 2026 through early 2027.

Is [pickle] officially approved?

Not yet. It's part of the Emoji 18.0 draft candidate set, targeted for September 2026. Unicode can still rename, redesign, or reject it before ratification.

Why is the codepoint U+1FADD showing an apple core on my Samsung?

Because it used to be Apple Core. U+1FADD was originally reserved for Apple Core on the Emoji 17.0 draft list, then deferred and dropped. Samsung's One UI 8.5 beta shipped with the old Apple Core glyph still hooked to the codepoint. It'll get replaced with Pickle before Emoji 18.0 is finalized.

What does [pickle] look like without font support?

A whole green dill pickle, slightly curved, with visible textured bumps on the skin. Most draft designs include a detached slice showing the cross-section and seeds so the viewer can tell it's a cucumber-derivative, not a bell pepper or zucchini.

• •U+1FADD, where [pickle] lives, was originally reserved for Apple Core before Unicode dropped the apple core concept and moved pickle into the slot.
• •Samsung's One UI 8.5 beta ships with U+1FADD still rendering as an apple core, a visible pre-ratification mismatch you can screenshot.
• •The phrase 'in a pickle' dates to 1562, half a century before Shakespeare's use of it in The Tempest. He didn't coin it.
• •Etymology: 'pickle' comes from Middle Dutch pekel, meaning a spicy brine. The Dutch phrase in de pekel zijn (to sit in the pickle brine) is the proposed root of the English idiom.
• •Pickleball had 24.3 million US players in 2025, up 171% over three years. It's been America's fastest-growing sport for four consecutive years.
• •Over 70% of pickleball players are aged 18 to 44, which killed the sport's early reputation as a retiree activity and turned it into a Gen Z / Millennial workplace social event.
• •The US pickled-cucumber industry generates roughly $2.7 billion in annual retail sales, with dill dominating and spicy varieties the fastest-growing subcategory.
• •Cornichons (tiny French gherkins) and dills (larger American pickles) come from the same cucumber species (Cucumis sativus). The size difference is harvest timing, not genetics.
• •Drinking pickle juice for leg cramps isn't old-wives-tale territory. A 2010 study in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise found pickle juice relieved cramps about 45% faster than water, likely via a nerve-reflex rather than electrolytes.