Pig Face Emoji

The pig face emoji shows a friendly pink pig snout looking straight at you. On the surface it's cute, but under that snout lies one of the most culturally loaded animal emojis in all of Unicode.

In Western texting, 🐷 usually means one of three things: you just ate too much ("pigged out 🐷"), you're being playfully self-deprecating about food, or you're calling someone adorable in a roundabout way. Couples use it as a pet name. Friends use it after demolishing an entire pizza. It's almost never genuinely insulting between people who actually like each other.

But context matters enormously. In Chinese culture, calling someone a pig can be a term of endearment meaning "cute but naughty." In Korean culture, pigs symbolize wealth so strongly that dreaming of a pig means you should buy a lottery ticket. In Islam and Judaism, the pig carries deep religious taboo. And in English slang since at least 1874, "pig" has referred to police officers. One emoji, wildly different readings depending on who receives it.

🐷 lives a double life on social media. On food TikTok and Instagram, it's the go-to reaction after showing a massive meal haul, a charcuterie board, or a "what I ate today" post. It's self-aware gluttony. The "just ate three servings 🐷" energy.

Couples use it differently. In East Asian social media, especially on WeChat and KakaoTalk, sending 🐷 to your partner is like saying "you're my little piggy" and it's affectionate, not insulting. Chinese couples in particular use 猪 (pig) as a love term. If your Chinese-speaking boyfriend sends you 🐷, he's probably flirting.

The emoji also shows up during Chinese New Year celebrations, especially during the Year of the Pig (most recently 2019). And every March 1st, Americans celebrate National Pig Day, founded in 1972 by two sisters in Texas who wanted pigs to get their "rightful, though generally unrecognized, place" among domesticated animals.

One place to be careful: sending 🐷 to someone of Muslim or Jewish faith without context can come across as insensitive given religious dietary restrictions around pork. It's been documented as a tool of online Islamophobia, which is worth knowing even if you'd never use it that way.

🐷 is rarely flirty in Western texting, but it's a legitimate flirty pet name in Chinese and Korean dating culture. If someone sends it with food context, it's friendly. If they send it as a standalone nickname for you, they're either very comfortable with you or very rude. The cultural background of the sender matters more here than with most emojis.

• •In Chinese: 小猪 (little pig) = affectionate pet name, the emoji version is flirty
• •After a shared meal = bonding, not romantic unless combined with other signals
• •As a reaction to your selfie = could go either way, check the vibe
• •Combined with hearts (🐷❤️) = almost certainly affectionate

Pigs were among the first animals domesticated by humans, roughly 9,000 years ago in Anatolia and China independently. Their cultural status has swung between extremes ever since.

In ancient Rome, pork was the most prized domestic meat, consumed by rich and poor in every form imaginable. No other animal had so many Latin names. But among Jewish rabbis of the same era, pigs became symbols of corruption and Roman oppression.

The pork taboo in Judaism and Islam is ancient, but the real reason may be practical rather than spiritual. A 2025 article in Archaeology Magazine argues the prohibition gained special status only after Alexander the Great's invasion of the Levant in 332 BC, when European conquerors brought their love of pork with them. Not eating pig became a marker of identity and resistance.

The emoji itself arrived in Unicode 6.0 in 2010 and joined Emoji 1.0 in 2015. It sits alongside 🐖 (full-body pig) and 🐽 (pig nose), forming a three-emoji pig family. The face version is the most popular by far, ranked #225 globally on social media.

1. 2010Pig Face approved in Unicode 6.0 as U+1F437↗
2. 2015Added to Emoji 1.0, available on all major platforms
3. 2018Peppa Pig banned from China's Douyin, making pig imagery politically charged
4. 2019Year of the Pig drives massive spike in pig emoji usage globally

Few emojis carry as much cultural baggage as 🐷.

In China, pigs symbolize wealth, abundance, and good fortune. The pig is the 12th and final animal of the Chinese zodiac, and people born in Pig years (1971, 1983, 1995, 2007, 2019) are considered honest, generous, and diligent. During Lunar New Year celebrations, 🐷 floods social media. But China also gave us the strangest pig story in recent history: in 2018, authorities banned Peppa Pig from Douyin after the cartoon character was co-opted by the "shehuiren" (社会人) youth subculture. Young people wore Peppa tattoos and watches as ironic gangster symbols. Over 30,000 clips were removed.

In Korea, pigs mean money. The Korean word 돈 can mean both "pig" and "money." If you dream of a pig in Korea, you buy a lottery ticket. The best dream is a crowd of pigs blocking a road.

In Japan, the Chinese zodiac replaces the pig with a boar (猪, inoshishi). The boar represents reckless courage rather than gentle prosperity.

In Islamic and Jewish cultures, pigs are religiously unclean. Sending 🐷 to someone observing halal or kosher dietary laws without context is at best tone-deaf. Research has documented pig emoji being weaponized on Islamophobic social media pages.

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

• •Pigs were domesticated independently in both Anatolia and China around 9,000 years ago, making them one of the earliest animals humans tamed.
• •In ancient Rome, no animal had more Latin names than the pig. It was the most popular meat across all social classes.
• •The pork taboo may have originated as identity politics: after Alexander the Great brought Greek pork-eating culture to the Levant in 332 BC, refusing pork became a marker of resistance.
• •In Germany, 'Schwein haben' (to have a pig) means to have good luck. Marzipan pigs are traditional New Year gifts.
• •National Pig Day was founded on March 1, 1972 by two sisters in Texas who believed pigs deserved more respect as intelligent domesticated animals.
• •The John Pork meme, a CG pig-human hybrid, hit 900 million TikTok views with the #johnpork hashtag in 2023.

• •Sending 🐷 as a pet name works in East Asian dating culture but can easily be misread as body-shaming in Western contexts. Always establish the nickname before using it casually.
• •Using 🐷 to refer to police is common in some communities but can be highly offensive in others. It's not worth the ambiguity in any context where miscommunication could escalate.
• •Some people send 🐷 to mean 'piggy bank' (savings), but without the 🏦 or 💰 combo, the recipient will almost never read it that way.

• •Babe (1995) — The movie that made everyone cry over a pig. Farmer Hoggett's quiet "That'll do, pig. That'll do." is one of cinema's most emotionally devastating lines. Seven Oscar nominations, $254M box office, and it turned James Cromwell into a real-life vegan.
• •Miss Piggy (The Muppets, 1976-) — The original diva pig. Her karate chops are legendary, and she pioneered the energy that 🐷💅 captures: unapologetically confident, dramatically in love with Kermit, and willing to fight literally anyone who gets in her way.
• •Peppa Pig (2004-) — A children's cartoon that became a banned subversive symbol in China. The Communist Party removed 30,000+ clips from Douyin in 2018 after Chinese youth co-opted Peppa as ironic gangster imagery. Peppa tattoos and watches became counterculture accessories.
• •Charlotte's Web (1952/1973/2006) — E.B. White's Wilbur taught generations of children that pigs have feelings, friendships, and deserve better than becoming breakfast. "Some Pig" written in a spider's web remains one of literature's most iconic animal advocacy moments.
• •Porky Pig (1935-) — Warner Bros.' stuttering pig who closes every Looney Tunes episode with "Th-th-th-that's all, folks!" One of the first cartoon pigs to become a household name.
• •John Pork (2018-2023) — An anonymous Italian artist created a CG pig-human hybrid influencer that went massively viral as the "John Pork is calling" TikTok meme in March 2023. A death hoax followed, because the internet can't have nice things.

• •Pig Face is U+1F437U+1F437. The full-body pig is U+1F416U+1F416 and pig nose is U+1F43DU+1F43D. All three are part of the animal faces block.
• •Shortcodes: :pig::pig: on Slack/Discord/GitHub. Some platforms use :pig_face::pig_face: to distinguish from the full-body variant.
• •No skin tone modifiers apply to animal emojis. The pig is always pink across all platforms.
• •In accessibility contexts, screen readers announce this as 'pig face,' which is distinct from 'pig' (U+1F416U+1F416) and 'pig nose' (U+1F43DU+1F43D).

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