Pie Emoji

🥧 shows a golden pie baked in a tin with a crimped lattice crust and steam curling off the top. Apple's design (the one most phones show) is a whole uncut pie, not a slice, which is unusual for food emoji and has a specific reason: the proposal to Unicode argued for a covered-top pie so it could stand in for any pie tradition, not just American fruit pies. A British steak-and-kidney pie, a Jamaican beef patty, an Australian meat pie, and a pecan pie all pass under that same crust.

In practice, though, 🥧 is read as dessert almost everywhere except the UK. It carries four main jobs: Thanksgiving (pumpkin pie specifically), Pi Day on March 14 (the pi/pie homophone turned this emoji into the unofficial mascot of math nerds), comfort food and home baking, and the term-of-endearment tail of words like cutie pie and sweetie pie.

The pie in the emoji is silent on flavor, which is probably why it survives in so many contexts without getting boxed in. You can be talking about a grandmother's apple pie, a stoner meme about 3.14159, or a dinner-party humblebrag about your homemade sour cherry lattice, and the same glyph fits all three.

🥧 has one predictable spike and one weird one. The predictable spike is late November in the US, when Thanksgiving posts drag it out alongside 🦃 and 🍂. The weird spike is March 14, when Pi Day turns every STEM account, math teacher, and university admissions office into a pie emoji factory. MIT times its undergraduate admissions decisions to 6:28 PM on March 14 (that's 2π, aka tau time) and posts pie emojis when the letters go out.

Outside those two windows, 🥧 shows up in food content, recipe blogs, cozy autumn aesthetic posts, and any caption where someone is trying to invoke warmth without the overused 🥰 or 🔥. On TikTok, baking creators pair 🥧 with 👩‍🍳 and 🍎 on pie-tutorial thumbnails. On X, it's a staple of the 'today I baked' weekend genre.

There's also a flirty edge in certain corners. When a woman sends 🥧 in a playful DM, slang guides note it can carry the same soft, cutesy charge as calling someone cutie pie. It's rare and context-heavy. Most of the time, 🥧 just means the person is hungry or it's almost Thanksgiving.

Pie as a food concept is older than the word pie in English. The earliest documented European pies were Roman and medieval, but the first recorded recipe that modern readers would recognize as apple pie appears in The Forme of Cury around 1390, compiled by the master cooks of King Richard II. That recipe used apples, figs, raisins, pears, and saffron inside a pastry shell called a coffin, which is the Middle English word for case or box.

British colonists brought pie traditions to North America in the 1600s. In England, pie was mostly savory: meat, game, eel, mutton. The American dessert pie we recognize today is a 19th-century phenomenon. Slate traces the switch to the 1810s, when a domestic U.S. sugar industry made fruit pies suddenly cheap and everyday. Fruit pies displaced meat pies on American home tables within two generations. In Britain, meat pies stayed in their dominant lane.

The 🥧 emoji itself came later than it should have. For years there was no pie emoji, and a Change.org petition plus a Food52 essay 'Why Is There No Pie Emoji?' built public pressure. In September 2016, Food52 editor Kenzi Wilbur and Gabrielle Lewis filed proposal L2/16-272 to the Unicode Consortium. They made a deliberate choice to propose a pie with a covered top so it could represent British, American, Jamaican, Australian, and other pie cultures equally. The Consortium accepted the proposal, and 🥧 shipped with Unicode 10.0 in June 2017.

1. 1390First documented apple pie recipe appears in The Forme of Cury in England.
2. 1801William Playfair invents the pie chart in his Statistical Breviary, unrelated to dessert but forever tied to the word.
3. 1988Larry Shaw founds Pi Day at the San Francisco Exploratorium, launching the annual pie-math pun.
4. 2012MIT begins releasing undergraduate admissions decisions on March 14 at 6:28 PM (tau time).
5. 2016Food52 editors Kenzi Wilbur and Gabrielle Lewis submit proposal L2/16-272 to Unicode.
6. 2017🥧 ships with Unicode 10.0 and iOS 11.1. The Apple design uses a whole uncut lattice pie.

In the United States, pie means dessert by default. Apple, pumpkin, pecan, cherry, and key lime dominate. The American Pie Council puts apple in first place at 19% of Americans' stated favorite, with pumpkin (13%) and pecan (12%) behind it. Instacart 2024 data ranks them by actual sales: apple 29%, pumpkin 23%, pecan 9%. Regional preferences split predictably, with pecan dominating the South and cherry belts through the Midwest.

In the United Kingdom, pie leans savory. Steak and kidney, chicken and mushroom, pork pies eaten cold at picnics, and shepherd's pie (which isn't technically a pie since it has a potato top, not pastry). When a British person says 'let's get pie,' they mean a pub lunch, not dessert. The 🥧 emoji design, which reads clearly as sweet to Americans, reads more ambiguously to British users.

In Australia, the meat pie is a national food. The AFL grand final and the Bunnings Warehouse sausage sizzle are about the only cultural institutions more Australian than a servo meat pie with tomato sauce.

In Jamaica, pie can mean a beef patty, the flaky yellow turnover sold at every bakery. In Mexico and parts of Latin America, pay (borrowed from English) is a dessert, often key lime or cream-based. The Unicode proposal's choice to go with a covered-top pie was a deliberate nod to all of this.

• •The first known apple pie recipe was written around 1390 in The Forme of Cury, the cookbook of King Richard II's kitchens. It included figs, raisins, pears, and saffron, not just apples.
• •Americans eat an estimated 50 million pumpkin pies every Thanksgiving, which is roughly one pie for every 6.7 people in the country.
• •The pie chart was invented by Scottish engineer William Playfair in 1801, almost four centuries after apple pie recipes first appeared. He used it to show the landholdings of the Ottoman Empire.
• •MIT releases undergraduate admissions decisions on Pi Day at 6:28 PM, which is 2π in hours, a nod to the tau-vs-pi debate among mathematicians.
• •Pi Day was founded in 1988 by Larry Shaw at the San Francisco Exploratorium. Staff and the public marched around a circle and then ate fruit pies. The US House formally recognized the date in 2009.
• •The 🥧 emoji only shipped in 2017, despite pies predating email by about six hundred years. Food52 and a Change.org petition pressured Unicode into approving it.
• •Cutie pie as a term of endearment is older than you'd guess: the OED's earliest example is 1920, in the Washington Post.
• •Per Instacart 2024 Pi Day data, apple pie is the most-bought pie in America at 29% of sales, with pumpkin at 23% and pecan at 9%.

• •American Pie (1999): The Jason Biggs apple-pie scene became a cultural shorthand for late-90s teen comedy. Screenwriter Adam Herz) credited the title to the phrase 'as American as apple pie.'
• •'American Pie' by Don McLean (1971): The folk-rock epic uses American pie as a symbol for lost innocence. Unrelated to the film but tangled with it in public memory.
• •Twin Peaks 'damn fine cherry pie': Agent Dale Cooper's catchphrase at the Double R Diner is one of the most quoted food lines in television history.
• •Waitress (2007 film, 2016 Broadway musical): Sara Bareilles's adaptation built its emotional arc around pie as memory and metaphor, running on Broadway from 2016 to 2020.
• •The Great British Bake Off pie week: The annual pie-themed episode is one of the show's most watched and has seeded countless TikTok bake attempts.