Printer Emoji

The printer emoji (🖨️) shows an inkjet or laser printer, the office peripheral that was supposed to die in the 1990s and still hasn't. The "paperless office" was predicted in a 1975 Business Week article. Fifty years later, the global printer market was $53.28 billion in 2024 and growing. Printers are the cockroaches of computing: unloved, unreliable, impossible to kill.

🖨️ arrived in Unicode 7.0 (2014) as part of the same office peripherals batch as 🖥️, ⌨️, and the trackball. It's drawn as a squat boxy desktop printer on most platforms, usually with a sheet of paper emerging from the top or front. The design hasn't aged, partly because printers haven't visually changed much since about 1995.

Culturally, 🖨️ carries two opposing vibes. The practical one: documents, homework, tax forms, shipping labels, boarding passes, the basic admin stuff of adult life. The cursed one: paper jams, blinking red lights, the PC LOAD LETTER error, and Office Space's iconic 1999 printer-smashing scene. Very few emojis carry this much pre-existing trauma.

🖨️ mostly shows up in three contexts. First, practical: "printing boarding passes 🖨️", "finally bought a 🖨️ for the new apartment", office memos and homework. Second, humor: printer-jam jokes, IT-support misery posts, and the eternal "it worked yesterday" genre. Third, slang: Gen Z's "fax no printer" means "true, no cap," the logic being that a fax is a real document and a printer just makes copies. The printer is the unreliable cousin of the fax. It's linguistically unfair but fun.

On TikTok, 🖨️ also shows up around 3D printing content (26M+ posts) and in "ASMR printing" videos where people film printers churning out perfect color prints. The calm-printer-doing-its-job genre is a quiet counter-trend to the usual printer-rage content. Maker communities on r/3Dprinting (3.1M+ members) also use 🖨️ extensively, though usually with reference to a very different machine.

The printer emoji arrived in Unicode 7.0 (June 2014) in the same batch that added the desktop computer, keyboard, and trackball. That batch was about filling gaps in the office-tech set, which had been frozen at phone and fax since the original Japanese emoji from the late 1990s.

Design across platforms is unusually consistent. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, and WhatsApp all draw a squat, chunky desktop printer with a sheet of paper sticking out. No one got creative with it. Compare that to 💻, where every vendor has their own laptop brand embedded in the design. The printer emoji is the platonic printer.

The design also predates the rise of 3D printing as a mainstream technology. By 2020, a growing share of 🖨️ usage referred to 3D printers, a whole different machine the emoji was never designed for. Unicode hasn't proposed a separate 3D printer emoji, so 🖨️ does double duty.

1. 2014Approved in Unicode 7.0 alongside desktop, keyboard, mouse, and trackball. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015.
2. 2018Apple and Google both refresh 🖨️ to a flatter, less skeuomorphic design. Still a boxy desktop printer, just cleaner.
3. 20203D printing explodes on TikTok and Reddit. 🖨️ starts picking up a second meaning, mostly driven by the maker community.
4. 2023Samsung's emoji update gives 🖨️ a touchscreen panel on the front, reflecting modern all-in-one printers.

• •The HP LaserJet (1984) was the first desktop laser printer. It debuted at $3,495 (about $10,500 in 2026 dollars), printed 8 pages per minute at 300 dpi, and defined the office printer for the next decade. Apple's LaserWriter shipped a year later.
• •Printer ink is one of the most expensive liquids on Earth by volume, more costly than vintage champagne. A gallon of HP ink can cost over $9,000. The razor-and-blades model (cheap printer, expensive refills) has defined the industry since the 1990s.
• •The 'paperless office' was predicted in a 1975 Business Week article. Five decades later, the global printer market is $53.28 billion and still growing. The prediction didn't fail; it just took the L.
• •Austria has the highest rate of household printer ownership in the world at 69%. Germany and Japan are close behind. Paperwork-heavy cultures keep 🖨️ alive.
• •Office Space's printer scene used 20 identical HP LaserJet printers during filming. Most of the acting was improvised. 'PC LOAD LETTER' is a real HP LaserJet error message that means 'put letter-size paper in the paper cassette.'
• •The r/3Dprinting subreddit has over 3.1M members and is one of the fastest-growing maker communities on Reddit. When people post 🖨️ there, they mean a Bambu Lab or Prusa, not an HP.
• •During COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, home printer demand rose 42% as millions of people set up home offices. The paperless office became less paperless almost instantly.

• •Office Space (1999). The printer-smashing scene. Three office workers, a baseball bat, and the Geto Boys. The definitive moment in printer cinema. Still referenced 25+ years later.
• •The IT Crowd (UK, 2006-2013). 'Have you tried turning it off and on again?' became the universal tech-support catchphrase, often with 🖨️ as the implicit subject.
• •'Fax no printer' TikTok slang (2022-2024). Repurposed the printer as the dishonest half of a fax/printer pair. Millions of videos tagged.
• •r/3Dprinting. 3.1M+ members. Made 🖨️ mean something completely different for the maker community.
• •HP's 'Print is Dead. Long Live Print.' campaigns (2010s). HP literally had to run multiple ad campaigns defending the existence of printers.