Raised Hand Emoji

A hand held up with fingers together, showing its palm. This is a gesture with two distinct lives: it's either "stop" or "high five," and those couldn't be more different.

Emojipedia describes it simply: "may be used to mean stop, or as a high-five." Dictionary.com goes deeper, noting it can also represent raising your hand to speak, volunteering, swearing an oath, or the 90s catchphrase "talk to the hand." That's a lot of range for five fingers and a palm.

The "stop" meaning is the dominant one. When someone texts "✋ hold on" or responds to a bad take with just "✋," they're putting up a boundary. It's the digital equivalent of a crossing guard's palm. The high five meaning requires context (usually following good news or a celebration). And the "talk to the hand" meaning, while dated, hasn't fully died. It's still the go-to dismissal emoji for people who grew up in the 90s.

What most people don't know: showing an open palm is a serious insult in Greece and parts of the Middle East. Called the "moutza" in Greek culture, the gesture of thrusting an open palm toward someone dates back to Byzantine times and is considered deeply offensive. Something to keep in mind when texting Greek friends.

✋ has carved out a specific niche in digital communication that goes beyond its literal gesture.

In Zoom and virtual meetings, the "raise hand" feature uses this exact gesture, making ✋ feel professional and functional. Zoom's raise hand feature even supports hand gesture recognition, where holding your palm up to the camera triggers the raised hand emoji reaction.

On social media, ✋ is most often a boundary-setter. "✋ don't come at me" or "✋ I'm done with this conversation" shuts things down. In activism contexts, it signals solidarity or protest. In sports, it's a high five.

The skin tone dimension matters here too. The raised hand was one of the first emojis to receive skin tone modifiers in Unicode 8.0 (2015), based on the Fitzpatrick dermatology scale. The choice of default yellow vs. a specific skin tone on hand emojis carries social weight that's been the subject of academic research and public discourse.

The raised hand gesture is one of the oldest human communication signals, appearing in cave paintings and ancient art. As a "stop" signal, it's used by crossing guards, traffic police, and referees worldwide. As a greeting or oath, it appears in courtroom swearing-in ceremonies, military salutes (palm forward), and religious worship.

The emoji version was approved in Unicode 6.0 in 2010. Its codepoint U+270BU+270B actually predates emoji standardization; it existed as a dingbat character before being adopted into the emoji set. In 2015, it became one of the first emojis to receive skin tone modifiers, a Unicode 8.0 addition based on the Fitzpatrick dermatology scale.

The skin tone addition wasn't simple. Academic research has examined how the Fitzpatrick scale, originally developed in 1975 to classify skin responses to UV light, became the basis for emoji skin color. Critics noted that mapping a medical tanning classification onto emoji representation of human diversity was an imperfect fit, but it established the precedent that all other emoji skin tones now follow.

The 90s "talk to the hand" era gave the raised palm its attitude. The gesture became a pop culture staple in shows, movies, and schoolyard dismissals, and ✋ inherited that energy when it became an emoji.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+270BU+270B RAISED HAND. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. Skin tone modifiers became available in Unicode 8.0 (2015). The codepoint U+270B existed before emoji standardization as a dingbat character, then was adopted into the emoji set.

This is an emoji where cultural awareness genuinely matters. In the United States, it's a stop sign or high five. In Greece, showing an open palm toward someone is the "moutza," a deeply offensive insult dating back to Byzantine times when criminals had soot rubbed in their faces with an open hand. In parts of Pakistan and some East African countries, a similar open-palm gesture can be interpreted as a curse.

In virtual meetings, the raised hand has become culturally universal thanks to Zoom and Teams normalizing the gesture. But in face-to-face or casual texting contexts, the cultural reading can vary significantly. When in doubt with international contacts, pair ✋ with words to clarify your intent.

• •The codepoint U+270BU+270B existed as a dingbat character before emoji were standardized. It was adopted into the emoji set when Unicode 6.0 formalized emoji in 2010, giving it a second life as a digital hand gesture.
• •Zoom's hand gesture recognition can automatically detect when you hold up your palm and trigger the ✋ raised hand reaction in meetings. The emoji became a literal UX feature.
• •Academic research has examined how the Fitzpatrick scale, originally a medical UV-response classification from 1975, became the standard for emoji skin tones after being applied to ✋ and other hand emojis in 2015.

• •✋ without context can read as either celebratory (high five) or hostile (stop/dismiss). Adding words removes the ambiguity.
• •Sending ✋ to someone from Greece can be read as the moutza, a serious insult. Cultural context matters more with this emoji than most.
• •In work contexts, responding to a colleague's idea with just ✋ can read as "stop" or "I disagree" rather than the intended "I have something to add." Pair with words.

• •"Talk to the hand" was the defining dismissal catchphrase of the 1990s, and ✋ is its digital descendant. The phrase hit peak saturation in films like Clueless (1995), The Nanny, and Martin. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator 3 (2003) even used "talk to the hand" as a punchline, which was widely considered the moment the phrase officially died.
• •Zoom's raise hand feature, which uses ✋ as its icon, became a pandemic-era workplace staple. By 2021, the raised hand emoji had transcended texting to become a literal software interaction, with Zoom's gesture recognition detecting physical palm-up hand raises through webcams.

• •✋ is U+270BU+270B. Unicode name: RAISED HAND. CLDR: "raised hand." Common shortcodes: :raised_hand::raised_hand: (Slack, Discord, GitHub), :hand::hand: (some platforms).
• •Supports all five Fitzpatrick skin tone modifiers (U+1F3FB through U+1F3FF). When rendering skin tone variants, the modifier follows the base codepoint: U+270B U+1F3FDU+270B U+1F3FD for medium skin tone. Default renders as yellow.
• •Note: U+270BU+270B predates emoji standardization. It was originally a dingbat character before being adopted into Unicode 6.0's emoji set in 2010.

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