Pouting Cat Emoji

😾 is the angry cat that knocked your water glass off the counter and maintained eye contact the entire time. Furrowed brow, tight frown, pointed ears. It's the feline version of 😡, but where 😡 feels genuinely hostile, 😾 wraps the same anger in whiskers and makes it almost cute.

The emoji sits at the end of the nine cat face set, which mirrors the range of human emotions: happy (😺), laughing (😹), in love (😻), smirking (😼), kissing (😽), shocked (🙀), sad (😿), and finally angry (😾). It's fitting that the set closes with anger. Cats are famously temperamental, and 😾 captures that specific displeasure of a cat that's been picked up when it didn't want to be.

In real life, this face maps to a well-documented behavior. When a cat flattens its ears back and narrows its pupils into slits, that's a "leave me alone" signal. A 2023 study published in *Behavioural Processes* found cats have 276 distinct facial expressions, with 37% categorized as aggressive. 😾 encodes the most recognizable one.

People use 😾 in two main ways. The first is literal cat commentary: "She knocked the Christmas tree over again 😾" or reacting to cat behavior that's aggressively cat-like. Cat Instagram, cat Twitter, and cat TikTok all run on this emoji.

The second use is self-expression with plausible cuteness. "Monday 😾" or "Don't talk to me before coffee 😾" uses the cat face to soften what would otherwise be a complaint. You're grumpy, but you're grumpy in a way that invites sympathy rather than concern. Nobody worries when you send 😾 the way they might if you sent 😡.

There's a passive-aggressive lane too. In group chats and Slack channels, 😾 can serve as a reaction that says "I'm annoyed but I'm being cute about it." It's more expressive than 😒 and less intense than 🤬. The cat packaging gives everyone permission to not take it too seriously.

Like all nine cat face emojis, 😾 traces back to au by KDDI, the Japanese phone carrier that added animated cat faces to their proprietary emoji set in 2003. As Emojipedia noted, these were preserved when the Unicode Consortium standardized emoji in 2010 for backward compatibility. 😾 was encoded as U+1F63EU+1F63E POUTING CAT FACE in Unicode 6.0.

But the emoji found its cultural moment nine years before it reached most phones. On September 22, 2012, Bryan Bundesen posted a photo of his sister's cat Tardar Sauce on Reddit. The cat had an underbite and feline dwarfism (achondroplasia), conditions that gave her a permanently grumpy expression. Within hours, the internet had a new mascot. Grumpy Cat became a meme empire: a line of merchandise, a bestselling book, a Lifetime movie (*Grumpy Cat's Worst Christmas Ever*, 2014, voiced by Aubrey Plaza), endorsement deals, and a $710,001 copyright infringement verdict against Grenade Beverages for overstepping their coffee licensing deal. Her manager estimated she generated roughly $100 million in revenue, though her owner disputed that figure.

Tardar Sauce died on May 14, 2019, at age seven from complications of a urinary tract infection. By then, 😾 had become her emoji shorthand. Every time someone sends 😾, they're channeling the energy of a mixed-breed domestic shorthair from Arizona whose face launched a media franchise.

1. 2003Au by KDDI adds animated cat face emoji set to their proprietary Type D-1 collection↗
2. 2010Encoded as U+1F63E POUTING CAT FACE in Unicode 6.0↗
3. 2012Grumpy Cat (Tardar Sauce) posted to Reddit on September 22, giving 😾 a real-world avatar↗
4. 2015Added to Emoji 1.0, becomes available on iOS and Android
5. 2017Name shortened from 'Pouting Cat Face' to 'Pouting Cat' in Emoji 5.0

Japan's relationship with grumpy cats predates the internet by centuries. The maneki-neko tradition emphasizes friendly, beckoning cats, but Japanese folklore also features the bakeneko, a supernatural cat that could be vengeful and terrifying. The emoji set captures both poles: 😺 is the welcoming cat, 😾 is the one you don't cross.

In Western internet culture, 😾 is basically a Grumpy Cat emoji. The association is so strong that Emojipedia's own page mentions Grumpy Cat directly. In Korea and Japan, grumpy cat photos are popular on social media with their own hashtags, but the cultural reading is more "tsundere" (cold on the outside, soft on the inside) than purely angry.

• •Grumpy Cat's permanent frown was caused by feline dwarfism (achondroplasia) and an underbite. The condition affects the fibroblast growth receptor gene, causing short legs, a large head, and that signature grumpy face.
• •Grumpy Cat won a $710,001 jury verdict against Grenade Beverages in 2018 for exceeding the terms of their coffee licensing deal. The breakdown: $450K for trademark infringement, $200K for copyright infringement, $30K in personal damages, and $1 for breach of contract.
• •Smudge the Cat (from the "Woman Yelling at Cat" meme) got his viral moment in May 2019. The original photo captioned "he no like vegetals" was posted to Tumblr in June 2018. He amassed 1.5 million Instagram followers and the meme won Shorty Awards Meme of the Year.
• •The word "grawlix" (those @#$%! swearing symbols) entered the OED in March 2025. 😾 and 🗯️ are the visual anger family. 🤬 puts the grawlix on a face. 😾 is the face before the grawlix comes out.
• •Real cats signal anger through flattened ears, dilated pupils, and an arched back — not furrowed eyebrows. 😾's design anthropomorphizes cat anger using human anger cues (eyebrows, frown), making it readable to humans but biologically inaccurate as a cat expression.
• •😾 is one of the least-used cat face emoji in the 9-cat set, behind even 😿 (crying cat). Cat lovers on the internet prefer to share positive cat content, making the angry and sad cat faces niche choices in a family dominated by 😻 and 😺.

• •Some people read 😾 as genuinely hostile. It's not. The cat face softens the anger to playful grumpiness. If someone is actually furious, they'll pick 😡 or 🤬.
• •Occasionally confused with 😼 (wry smile cat), which is sly and mischievous rather than angry. Look at the eyebrows: 😾 has furrowed brows, 😼 has a smirk.

• •Grumpy Cat / Tardar Sauce (2012-2019) — The internet's most famous angry cat. Posted to Reddit on September 22, 2012, her permanent frown (caused by feline dwarfism) launched a franchise: merchandise, a Lifetime movie (*Grumpy Cat's Worst Christmas Ever*, 2014, voiced by Aubrey Plaza), a bestselling book, and coffee brand deals. Her manager estimated ~$100M in revenue. Emojipedia explicitly references Grumpy Cat on the 😾 page.
• •Woman Yelling at Cat / Smudge (2019) — Twitter user @MISSINGEGIRL combined a Real Housewives clip with a photo of Smudge the Cat sitting behind a salad. It won Meme of the Year at the 12th Shorty Awards (2020), Time magazine named Smudge the top online cat of 2020, and Smudge hit 1.5M Instagram followers. The meme's flexibility made it one of the decade's defining formats.
• •276 Facial Expressions Study (2023) — Researchers at Lyon College published a study in *Behavioural Processes* documenting 276 distinct cat facial expressions across 50 cats. 37% were aggressive. Coverage in Smithsonian, Washington Post, and Live Science broke the "cats are emotionless" stereotype wide open.

• •Codepoint is U+1F63EU+1F63E. Shortcodes: :pouting_cat::pouting_cat: (Slack, Discord, GitHub).
• •Last emoji in the cat face range: the nine cat faces span U+1F63AU+1F63A through U+1F640U+1F640, with 😾 at 1F63E1F63E and 🙀 at 1F6401F640.
• •Apple previously rendered 😾 in profile view (sideways), which made it look like a different emoji entirely. Current versions show it face-on.

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