Rat Emoji

A full-body gray or brown rat with a long scaly tail, usually shown in profile on all fours. Different from 🐭, which is a cartoon face, or 🐁, which is the smaller cousin. 🐀 reads more like an actual rodent than a cute character, and it carries the full weight of what rats mean to people: pests, snitches, subway royalty, and the Chinese zodiac's most underestimated sign.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F400U+1F400 RAT. Google used to draw it standing on its hind legs with visible buck teeth, a design that was eventually redrawn to match the side-profile convention used by every other vendor.

In actual messaging, 🐀 rarely shows up as a pet. It shows up as slang. Calling someone a rat means they snitched, betrayed, or informed on you. The usage goes back to at least Thomas Moore's 1819 satire The Fudge Family in Paris, and hardened in the early 20th century through organized-crime reporting and labor disputes. By the 1950s, 'rat' was the standard American English insult for an informer. The emoji inherits all of that.

🐀 has two distinct lives on social media, and they almost never overlap.

The first life is 'you're a snitch.' This is the dominant usage in English-language texting, especially in the US. Dropping 🐀 on someone in a group chat, comment section, or quote-tweet is a direct accusation. It pairs with 🚔, 👮, or 🤫 to say 'you went to the cops' or 'you told on me.' Rap lyrics and street culture codified this meaning. 'IMMA RAT… I AIN'T NO SNITCH' became a viral SideTalk NYC clip because the distinction between 'rat' and 'snitch' in hip-hop culture is genuinely contested.

The second life is NYC subway content. Pizza Rat in 2015 turned the NYC rat into a civic mascot. Videos of subway rats dragging slices, fighting pigeons, or riding escalators routinely hit millions of views, and 🐀 tags every one. The ~3 million rats living in New York City are a source of local pride as much as horror.

On TikTok, the emoji also showed up during Rat Girl Summer 2023, creator Lola Kolade's anti-diet-culture trend about scurrying around cities, eating what you want, and not overthinking. 'Being a rat' became an oddly affirming thing.

In Chinese contexts, 🐀 is zodiac content. The Year of the Rat was 2020, and the next one is 2032. On Lunar New Year, the emoji floods WeChat and Weibo as the first sign of the 12-year cycle.

The slang meaning predates the emoji by more than a century. People have been calling each other rats since at least the 16th century, but the specific 'informer' sense landed in the 19th. Thomas Moore's 1819 poem 'The Fudge Family in Paris' praised 'the peaching Rat … false enough to shirk [his] friends.' By 1910, the term was firmly attached to informers in American English, cemented by Prohibition-era crime reporting and labor-strike coverage. Every 'you dirty rat' in a 1930s gangster film helped lock it in.

The emoji itself arrived in Unicode 6.0 in October 2010 as part of the first big mammal batch. Rat wasn't controversial at Unicode: it's a Chinese zodiac sign, which gave it automatic global relevance, and it filled out the rodent category alongside 🐁 and 🐭.

The modern pop-culture rehabilitation started with Pixar's Ratatouille (2007)), which grossed $623 million) on a $150M budget, holds a 96% Rotten Tomatoes score, and won Best Animated Feature at the 2008 Oscars. Remy made rats briefly adorable again. The 2015 Pizza Rat video completed the rehab by making NYC's rat infestation into a civic personality trait.

In the United States and UK, 🐀 is almost always negative when used about a person, snitch, informer, traitor. Positive use is restricted to Ratatouille/Pizza Rat content or NYC civic humor. In prison and hip-hop culture the rat/snitch distinction is an active debate, with its own codes and quotes.

In China, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan (and across the Lunar New Year diaspora), 🐀 is zodiac content. The rat is the first of the 12 Chinese zodiac animals and people born in rat years (1960, 1972, 1984, 1996, 2008, 2020, 2032) are described as quick-witted, resourceful, adaptable, and ambitious. The emoji floods social media in the lead-up to Lunar New Year in those years.

In India, rats carry surprisingly positive religious meaning. The Karni Mata Temple in Rajasthan houses around 25,000 rats considered sacred, and spotting a rare white rat there is considered highly auspicious.

In New York specifically, 🐀 is local identity. The NYC rat has a level of cultural affection other cities' pests don't get. Nobody posts 🪳 about Chicago with the same pride.

• •The NYC rat population hit an estimated ~3 million in 2023, a 42% increase over the previous decade. Manhattan led the growth at +66%, followed by Brooklyn at +56% and the Bronx at +54%. That's roughly one rat for every three New Yorkers.
• •Ratatouille grossed $623 million worldwide) on a $150M budget, holds a 96% Rotten Tomatoes score, and won the 2008 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. The pitch: a rat becomes a Paris chef. Pixar sold it.
• •Calling someone a 'rat' for snitching has been documented in English since at least 1819, in Thomas Moore's satirical poem 'The Fudge Family in Paris.' The usage hardened during Prohibition and 1930s organized-crime reporting, and it's still the primary slang meaning today.
• •The Karni Mata Temple in Rajasthan, India houses around 25,000 rats as sacred animals. Spotting a rare white rat among them is considered an especially lucky omen, and pilgrims leave food offerings for the entire colony.
• •In 2015, the Pizza Rat video hit over 2 million views in its first 24 hours. NYC performance artist Zardulu later claimed to The Washington Post she staged it, an allegation the videographer still disputes.
• •Rats can tread water for up to three days and swim up through toilet pipes. This is not urban legend. NYC pest control gets documented toilet-rat calls every year.
• •Scientists have trained rats to detect tuberculosis and landmines with high accuracy. The Belgian nonprofit APOPO has been using African giant pouched rats for humanitarian mine clearance in Mozambique, Cambodia, and Angola since 1997.

• •Ratatouille (2007), Pixar's Oscar-winning film about Remy, a Parisian rat who dreams of becoming a chef. $623M global box office, 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, single-handedly made rats briefly aspirational. The follow-up TikTok musical 'Ratatouille the Musical' became its own 2020 viral moment and raised $2M for The Actors Fund.
• •Pizza Rat (2015), Matt Little's video of a brown rat dragging a pizza slice down NYC subway steps became one of the internet's most-shared animal videos. Spawned merchandise, Halloween costumes, and ongoing debate about whether it was staged by performance artist Zardulu.
• •The Departed (2006), Martin Scorsese's Boston crime drama ends with a rat crossing the frame as the final shot, a visual callback to the snitch theme running through the whole film. Won Best Picture.
• •NYC Rat Czar (2023), Mayor Eric Adams' $155,000 municipal position became an instant meme and a real job. Kathleen Corradi, the appointee, has since become a recurring character in NYC news.
• •Rat Girl Summer (2023), Lola Kolade's TikTok trend reframed rat energy as affirming: scurry around, eat your snacks, find yourself in places you have no business being. Hundreds of millions of views under the tag.