Pig Nose Emoji

🐽 is the close-up of a pig's snout, shown head-on so you see both nostrils. It's the only emoji in the pig family that isn't a whole animal or a full cartoon face. Just the nose. That narrow scope is why it ends up being the most playful of the four: it's small, goofy, and reads instantly as "I'm being a silly piggy."

In texting, 🐽 usually signals one of three things. First, the "pig nose" gesture, where you push your finger against the tip of your nose so your nostrils face forward, the universal kid-move for teasing a snob or denying something obvious. Second, eating so much that you've turned yourself into a cartoon pig, usually paired with food or 🍔🍕🍰. Third, Snapchat and TikTok pig filters, which map a digital snout onto your face and are a fixture of the AR filter ecosystem Snap rolled out in 2015.

What it doesn't do is carry the weight of its siblings. 🐷 is a pet name and a reaction. 🐖 is the zodiac and the BBQ. 🐗 is the wild one. 🐽 is a noise, a filter, a gesture. Approved in Unicode 6.0 in October 2010 as U+1F43D, it sat in the CLDR catalog as "pig nose" and has stayed mostly cosmetic ever since. If you want to be taken seriously while using a pig emoji, pick one of the others.

🐽 lives in three distinct corners. On Snapchat and TikTok, it's the written shorthand for "I used the pig filter" or "pigging out moment incoming." The Snap community has had an active pig nose filter scene for years, and the emoji shows up in captions when creators don't want to include the filter itself in the thumbnail.

On Instagram and X, it's a reaction to food. Overeating posts, dessert stacks, late-night drive-thru runs, buffet content. People drop 🐽 at the end of a caption the way older users drop 😅. It reads as self-deprecating rather than proud, which matters: saying "I ate three burgers 🐷" sounds like a pet name for yourself, while "I ate three burgers 🐽" sounds like you're making a face.

The third corner is kids and parents. Peppa Pig is the globally dominant pig character for anyone under 40, and the character's trademark snort noise has been viral on TikTok since 2022 via prank videos. 🐽 is the natural emoji for Peppa references, nursery-school updates, and kid costume photos. The official Peppa Pig TikTok account uses it constantly.

A note on tone. Because 🐽 is ambiguous and cartoony, it doesn't carry the political or religious weight that 🐖 and 🐷 sometimes do in contentious contexts. CyberWell's analysis of pig emoji used as dehumanizing symbols found almost no use of 🐽 in that pattern, because the full-animal versions read as more aggressive. 🐽 stays a gag.

The pig nose joined Unicode through the same 2007-2009 process that brought the rest of the SoftBank and KDDI Japanese carrier emojis into the main spec. The Unicode proposal documents referenced for 🐽 are L2/07-257 (2007) and L2/09-026 (2009), the batch that mapped Japanese mobile-phone pictograms onto the global standard. Approval followed in Unicode 6.0 in October 2010, and the CLDR project locked the short name as "pig nose" for screen readers.

Why include just a nose? Japanese carriers had a long history of body-part emojis (👃 nose, 👁️ eye, 👅 tongue, 👂 ear), and the pig nose specifically mapped to the cartoon-style ブタの鼻 ("buta no hana") icon that Japanese kids used in SMS for gags and sound effects. It was never meant to be a "real pig" symbol. The full pig and pig face were already handled by 🐷 and 🐖.

The biology behind the shape is more interesting than the emoji's pop-culture history. A pig's snout is a specialized organ with a prenasal bone supporting the cartilage disc, a structure called the rostral bone that lets pigs root through packed soil without damaging the nasal passages. Pigs have around 1,113 functional olfactory receptor genes, more than three times the human count of 350, which is why truffle hunters used them for centuries before the 1985 Italian ban protecting truffle mycelia from damage by rooting sows. A trained pig can smell a truffle three feet below ground. The emoji is a hugely simplified cartoon of one of the most sensitive sensory organs in mammals.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F43D PIG NOSE, derived from proposal documents L2/07-257 (2007) and L2/09-026 (2009), the batch that imported Japanese carrier emojis into Unicode. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. CLDR short name "pig nose."

1. 2007Proposal L2/07-257 maps Japanese carrier pig-nose emoji to Unicode↗
2. 2010Approved in Unicode 6.0 as U+1F43D↗
3. 2015Added to Emoji 1.0; Snapchat debuts AR face lenses including pig filters↗
4. 2017Snap launches Lens Studio, user-made pig filters flood the platform
5. 2019Year of the Pig drives a global spike, but 🐽 stays a decorative accent while 🐷 and 🐖 carry the zodiac work
6. 2022Peppa Pig snort prank videos go viral on TikTok, re-cementing 🐽 as the sound-effect emoji for parents and kids

🐽 is one of the rare emojis where language-specific meaning is driven not by symbolism but by onomatopoeia. Pigs make the same noise worldwide, but every language writes it differently, and the emoji inherits all of those conventions at once.

In English, pigs say "oink oink". 🐽 defaults to that reading for anglophone users. In French, it's "groin groin", which imitates the deeper snuffling grunt of a rooting pig. In Japanese, it's "buu buu" (ブーブー), closer to a low snort. In Swedish, it's "nöff nöff". In Polish, it's "chrum," using a consonant cluster English doesn't have.

The same pig. Different phonetic systems. Same emoji carrying all of it. When Japanese users send 🐽 they hear "buu," when French users send it they hear "groin," and neither feels like they're using the emoji "wrong."

Beyond sound, the gesture meaning differs by region. In the United States, pushing your nose up with a finger to mimic a pig snout has been kid-shorthand for "you're being a snob" since at least the 1950s, tied to the idiom "turning your nose up". 🐽 reads as that gesture in American texting. In Japan, the same emoji reads as a cartoon character's nose, closer to manga-style visual shorthand than an insult.

• •A pig's snout has around 1,113 functional olfactory receptor genes, more than three times the human count of roughly 350. Their sense of smell outranks most dogs.
• •A trained truffle pig can detect truffles three feet below ground. Italy banned pig truffle hunting in 1985 because the sows would damage the underground mycelia.
• •The pig snout has a specialized prenasal bone called the rostral bone, supporting the cartilage disc so pigs can root through packed soil without damaging their nasal passages.
• •Pigs say different things in different languages. "Oink" in English, "groin groin" in French, "nöff nöff" in Swedish, "buu buu" in Japanese, and "chrum" in Polish. Same pig. Same emoji.
• •The pig nose emoji was originally derived from Japanese carrier pictograms mapped into Unicode via proposal L2/07-257 in 2007. Japanese kids used it for comedic sound effects on SMS long before Americans saw it on an iPhone.
• •The kid gesture of pushing your nose up to form a "pig nose" is American slang for calling someone a snob, tied to the older idiom "turning your nose up."
• •Peppa Pig's trademark snort has been a viral TikTok sound since 2022. The official Peppa account joined in with its own snort compilation for 2025.
• •Unlike 🐖 and 🐷, 🐽 has not been flagged in major hate-speech analyses of pig emoji, largely because the full-animal versions read as more aggressive.