Pig Emoji

The full-body pig emoji shows a whole pink pig standing on all fours with a curly tail, in profile. It's the unglamorous twin of 🐷, which is just the cartoon snout. The face version dominates texting by a wide margin, but 🐖 has a specific job the face can't do: it looks like an actual animal.

When you want to talk about a real pig, a farm, a pork dish, or the Chinese zodiac, 🐖 is the correct choice. People reach for it in agricultural contexts, in food posts about bacon and whole hog barbecue, and in posts celebrating the Year of the Pig. It shows up less often as a reaction, because you can't really read emotion on a tiny sideways pig body.

There's a second layer worth knowing. In 2021, during the peak pandemic cuteness-emoji boom, 🐷 outscored 🐖 by roughly 5 to 1 in Google searches. By 2026 that gap has shrunk to less than 1.5 to 1. 🐖 is quietly catching up, mostly because zoomers keep discovering it and treating it as the "correct" pig, the one that isn't "trying too hard."

🐖 lives in three distinct corners of social media. First, farm and rural content: accounts like @thedailypig and livestock TikTok use 🐖 as a literal tag. Second, food content about whole-animal cooking: pig roasts, Hawaiian kalua pig, whole hog barbecue, Iberico ham. Third, Chinese zodiac posts, especially during Lunar New Year.

The emoji does not work the way 🐷 does. You can't really send someone 🐖 as a pet name. It's too anatomically complete. The face version is cute; the body version is an animal with a tail and four legs. Couples use 🐷. Butchers and farmers use 🐖.

The combo game is different too. 🐖🔥🍖 means a pig roast. 🐖🧧 means Lunar New Year. 🐖💰 is a rarer piggy-bank substitute (🐷🏦 is more common). On X and Reddit, the 🐖 emoji appears in political contexts more often than 🐷, because "pig" as slang for police dates to an 1874 London slang dictionary, and the full-body version reads as more pointed than the cute face.

Pigs were one of the first animals humans ever domesticated. Archaeological work in Anatolia and in the Yellow River valley in China dates pig domestication to roughly 9,000 years ago, independently, in two regions. That makes pigs older domesticated livestock than cattle, horses, or chickens.

The emoji itself has a much shorter history. It was approved in Unicode 6.0 in October 2010 as U+1F416, alongside 🐷 pig face (U+1F437) and 🐽 pig nose (U+1F43D). All three joined Emoji 1.0 in 2015 when the Unicode Consortium formally unified the emoji subset. A 2025 article in Archaeology Magazine traces the pork taboo in Judaism and Islam not to ancient dietary wisdom but to identity politics around Alexander the Great's 332 BC invasion of the Levant, when Greek conquerors brought their pork-heavy diet. Refusing pigs became a way to resist cultural assimilation.

So the 🐖 you tap into a text carries 9,000 years of partnership, 2,300 years of religious boundary-setting, and 14 years of Unicode history in one pink silhouette.

1. 2010Pig approved in Unicode 6.0 as U+1F416↗
2. 2015Added to Emoji 1.0
3. 2019Year of the Pig drives global spike in 🐖 usage for zodiac graphics
4. 2021WhatsApp redesigns 🐖 with a softer grin, matching its 🐷 treatment
5. 2024🐖 overtakes its historical low ratio versus 🐷, closing the gap from 5:1 to under 2:1

In China, pigs mean wealth, honesty, and abundance. The pig is the twelfth and final animal of the Chinese zodiac. Pig years include 1947, 1959, 1971, 1983, 1995, 2007, 2019, and 2031. 🐖 gets used more than 🐷 for formal zodiac graphics because it shows the whole animal. Every twelfth year the emoji floods Chinese-language WeChat.

In Korea, the pig is a money symbol. The Korean word 돼지 (pig) connects culturally to 돈 (money), and dreaming of a pig means you should buy a lottery ticket. The best dream is a mob of pigs blocking your path.

In Hawaii, 🐖 is inseparable from kalua pig, a whole hog cooked in an underground imu pit. Every luau post uses 🐖🔥🌺.

In the American South, whole hog BBQ is a regional identity. Pitmasters post 🐖 to announce a hog going on the pit.

In Germany and Austria, pigs are lucky. "Schwein haben" (to have a pig) means good luck. Marzipan pigs are traditional New Year gifts.

In Islamic and Jewish communities, pigs carry religious taboo. Research has documented 🐖 and 🐷 being weaponized on Islamophobic Facebook pages. Analysis from CyberWell tracked over 69,000 antisemitic posts using pig emoji as a dehumanizing symbol. Both 🐖 and 🐷 appear in this pattern, though 🐖 shows up more often because the full-body form reads as more aggressive.

• •Pigs were first domesticated around 9,000 years ago, independently in two places: Anatolia and southern China. That's older than cattle, horses, or chickens.
• •Pigs are widely considered smarter than dogs at problem-solving, with cognitive abilities roughly equivalent to a human three-year-old.
• •In a 2020 study, pigs could grasp verbal symbols like "fetch," "sit," and "jump" and performed comparably to dolphins.
• •The word "pig" as police slang was listed in an 1874 London slang dictionary and was documented even earlier in an 1811 Bow Street Runners reference.
• •In Korean dream interpretation, dreaming of pigs is so lucky that people buy lottery tickets after. The best dream is a mob of pigs blocking a road.
• •German speakers say "Schwein haben" (to have a pig) to mean "to have good luck." Marzipan pigs are a traditional New Year gift.
• •The pork taboo may not be ancient. A 2025 Archaeology Magazine piece argues the prohibition gained its modern religious weight after Alexander the Great's 332 BC invasion of the Levant, when refusing pork became a marker of cultural resistance.
• •Japan swaps the pig for the boar in the zodiac. Japanese Year of the Boar emphasizes reckless courage instead of Chinese prosperity.