Pretzel Emoji

A twisted pretzel with coarse salt crystals. 🥨 represents pretzels, German food culture, beer gardens, Oktoberfest, and snacking, but it's also one of the few food emojis with a real religious origin story.

The pretzel's shape supposedly represents arms crossed in prayer. According to legend, an Italian monk in 610 AD rolled dough strips into the crossed-arm prayer position to reward students who learned their prayers. The three holes represent the Holy Trinity. Historians debate the specifics, but pretzels have had religious significance in Christianity since the Middle Ages, when they were eaten during Lent (the simple flour-and-water recipe contained no forbidden ingredients).

The pretzel market is worth $7.95 billion globally, with Europe accounting for 57% of sales. Auntie Anne's, the world's largest soft pretzel chain, operates over 1,800 locations and generates $524 million in revenue. Pennsylvania produces 80% of America's pretzels, with the first commercial pretzel bakery (Julius Sturgis, 1861) still standing in Lititz, Lancaster County.

🥨 was approved in Unicode 10.0 (2017) as U+1F968U+1F968 PRETZEL, part of a food emoji batch that included 🥟 (dumpling), 🥤 (cup with straw), and 🥧 (pie).

🥨 serves double duty as both a food emoji and a slang term for something twisted or complicated.

Literally, it shows up in Oktoberfest posts, beer garden photos, sports stadium snack content, and mall food court references (Auntie Anne's is a cultural institution in American malls). National Pretzel Day (April 26) drives an annual spike.

In slang, 🥨 means "twisted" in various ways. Someone who's stressed out might be described as "pretzel 🥨" (tied up in knots). In flirty contexts, the pretzel emoji can mean wanting to "fold" someone, which is suggestive. And in everyday usage, replying 🥨 to a complicated situation just means "this is twisted."

The emoji also appears in yoga and flexibility content, where pretzel-like poses are a genre of their own.

The pretzel's origin story involves monks, prayer, and a shape that hasn't changed in over a thousand years.

The most popular legend places the invention in 610 AD, when an Italian monk shaped dough strips to resemble arms crossed in prayer (the standard prayer position in the Middle Ages). He called them "pretiola" (little rewards) and gave them to children who memorized their prayers. The three holes created by the twist represented the Holy Trinity.

By the 14th century, pretzels were deeply embedded in southern German culture, especially in Bavaria, Swabia, and Franconia. The pretzel became the official symbol of the baker's guild, and many German bakeries still use it as their emblem today. In the Middle Ages, pretzels were hung on Christmas trees and given as New Year's gifts for good luck.

The Bavarian Laugenbrezel (lye pretzel) was supposedly discovered by accident in early 19th-century Munich, when a baker dropped dough into a lye solution. Instead of throwing it out, he baked it and discovered the dark, glossy, distinctively flavored crust that defines German pretzels today.

Pretzels came to America with German immigrants who settled in Pennsylvania in the 1700s. Julius Sturgis opened the first commercial pretzel bakery in Lititz, Pennsylvania in 1861. Today, Pennsylvania produces 80% of America's pretzels. Snyder's of Hanover (1909), the world's largest pretzel manufacturer, is also based there.

1. 2017🥨 approved in [Unicode 10.0](https://emojipedia.org/pretzel) based on [proposal L2/16-316](https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16374-pretzel-emoji.pdf), part of a food batch that included 🥟 dumpling, 🥤 cup with straw, and 🥧 pie.
2. 2018Apple ships a Bavarian-style lye pretzel with coarse salt. Google and Samsung follow with similar designs, loosely aligned.
3. 2020Soft pretzel delivery spikes during COVID lockdowns as Auntie Anne's and Philly Pretzel Factory push online orders. 🥨 shows up in takeout order screenshots on social.
4. 2023National Pretzel Day (April 26) becomes the year's highest single-day use of 🥨 on X and Instagram, driven by brand campaigns and free-pretzel promos.

In Bavaria, the pretzel (Brezel) is practically a food group. At Oktoberfest, "Brotfrauen" (bread ladies) carry basket-sized pretzels through the beer tents. The Bavarian version is a lye-dipped soft pretzel with coarse salt, dark brown and glossy outside, soft and chewy inside. It's eaten alongside Weisswurst (white sausage) and sweet mustard for a traditional Bavarian breakfast. Pretzels are still used as symbols of love in some German regions, given as gifts on special occasions.

In Philadelphia, soft pretzels are a civic institution. Philly pretzels are different from the Bavarian version: lighter, chewier, often shaped in a figure-eight rather than the classic three-hole twist. They're sold on street corners and in schools, paired with yellow mustard (not the sweet Bavarian kind). The Federal Baking Company in South Philly once made a 40-pound pretzel that was five feet wide.

In the rest of America, 🥨 often means Auntie Anne's at the mall. The chain's 1,800+ locations have made the soft pretzel a mall food court staple, usually paired with cheese dip or cinnamon sugar.

The hard pretzel (the snack-bag version) is a completely different product from the soft pretzel, though both share the twisted shape and fall under 🥨.

• •The pretzel shape has been unchanged for over 1,000 years. The legend dates it to 610 AD, when a monk shaped dough to resemble arms crossed in prayer. The three holes represent the Holy Trinity.
• •Pennsylvania produces 80% of America's pretzels. The Julius Sturgis Pretzel Factory in Lititz (1861) is the oldest commercial pretzel bakery in America and is still a tourist destination.
• •At Oktoberfest, "Brotfrauen" (bread ladies) carry enormous pretzels in baskets from table to table through the beer tents. The pretzels are the size of dinner plates and meant to accompany massive steins of beer.
• •The Laugenbrezel (lye pretzel) was supposedly discovered by accident when a baker dropped dough into a sodium hydroxide solution. The chemical reaction creates the glossy brown crust that defines Bavarian-style pretzels.
• •The global pretzel market is worth $7.95 billion, with Europe accounting for 57% of sales. Auntie Anne's, the world's largest soft pretzel chain, operates 1,800+ locations and generates $524 million in revenue.
• •In the Middle Ages, pretzels were hung on Christmas trees and given as New Year's gifts symbolizing good luck and prosperity. The pretzel was the official emblem of the baker's guild, and many German bakeries still use it today.
• •Philadelphia's soft pretzels are a distinct tradition from German pretzels: lighter, chewier, figure-eight shaped, and eaten with yellow mustard. The Federal Baking Company once made a 40-pound pretzel that was five feet wide.