Rooster Emoji

The rooster emoji shows a male chicken with a red comb, wattle, and long curved tail feathers. It's the grown-up counterpart to 🐔 (hen) and carries a much heavier cultural load than its domestic cousin.

In texting, 🐓 mostly does three things. First, dawn. The rooster's crow is the oldest alarm clock on Earth, so 🐓 gets used for morning posts, early workouts, and "up before everyone else" bragging. Second, cockiness or pride. Roosters strut. Calling someone a 🐓 can be playful "you're a rooster" swagger or backhanded "okay Mr. Confident." Third, the emoji is a sly sexual innuendo, because "rooster" = "cock." Dictionary.com and Stay Hipp both flag the phallic reading, especially when 🐓 turns up unprompted in flirty DMs.

Globally, the rooster is a national symbol in multiple countries. France's coq gaulois has been on sports kits, war memorials, and Élysée Palace seals since the Middle Ages. Portugal's Galo de Barcelos is the country's tourism mascot. And 🐓 is the tenth animal of the Chinese zodiac, governing the years 1957, 1969, 1981, 1993, 2005, 2017, and next 2029.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F413U+1F413 ROOSTER.

🐓 has three distinct social-media lanes.

The morning lane. "Up with the roosters 🐓," "5am grind 🐓," pre-workout and hustle-culture content. This is the safest and most-used reading, especially on Twitter/X and LinkedIn where early-riser humblebrags are a fixed genre.

The national-pride lane. French sports content during Euros, World Cup, Rugby Six Nations, and Tour de France leans on 🐓 because it's the French Football Federation emblem. Portuguese users do the same with Galo de Barcelos content. Sri Lankan users use 🐓 for UNP political party posts (the rooster is its official symbol). Chinese New Year content in a Rooster year (most recently 2017) produces the largest Google Trends spike.

The flirty/innuendo lane. Because "rooster" and "cock" are synonyms, 🐓 doubles as a phallic emoji, similar to how 🍆 and 🌭 do. Reddit and TikTok comments use it as a winking sexual reference. This reading is why parents, HR departments, and brand social managers tend to avoid 🐓 in mixed-audience posts.

A smaller but active lane is backyard-chicken content. Rooster-owners on TikTok and Instagram post crowing compilations, breed comparisons, and "is my rooster too aggressive" troubleshooting. Cockfighting content is banned on every major platform (it's illegal in most of the US and most of Asia outside the Philippines and Guam), but the 🐓 emoji occasionally slips through in content that skirts the line.

The rooster's cultural pedigree is one of the longest in the animal kingdom. Chickens were domesticated from Southeast Asian red junglefowl around 8,000 years ago, and the rooster specifically became a symbol in nearly every civilization that encountered it.

In ancient Greece, the rooster was sacred to Asclepius (god of medicine). Socrates's last recorded words, per Plato's Phaedo, were "we owe a cock to Asclepius" as he asked Crito to pay the debt after his death.

In Christianity, the rooster is bound to Peter's denial. All four Gospels record Jesus predicting that Peter would deny him three times before the rooster crowed. The rooster's crow then became a medieval Christian symbol of vigilance and repentance, which is why you see weathervanes shaped like roosters on European church steeples. In 9th-century Rome, Pope Nicholas I decreed that all Catholic churches should display a rooster on their domes or steeples.

In France, the coq gaulois emerged from a Latin pun: Gallus meant both "Gaul" (an inhabitant of Roman Gaul) and "rooster." Originally an enemy insult directed at the French, it got reclaimed, appeared on French 20-franc gold coins from 1899 to 1914, then on thousands of post-WWI war memorials, and today is the emblem of the French Football Federation.

In China, the rooster is the tenth animal of the zodiac. The mythology says the Jade Emperor invited all animals to a great race; the rooster, despite teaming up with an ox, was upset at arriving tenth and has been crowing every morning since to wake the sun.

The emoji landed relatively early: Unicode 6.0 in 2010, shipped with the first major emoji batch on Apple iOS 5 in 2011.

1. 2010Rooster approved in Unicode 6.0 as U+1F413, part of the original 2010 emoji batch↗
2. 2011Ships on Apple iOS 5 alongside the first major emoji expansion. Apple's design features a classic red-comb/orange-body look
3. 2017Year of the Rooster (Fire Rooster) generates 🐓's largest recorded Google Trends spike, with Chinese New Year posts flooding Weibo and WeChat↗
4. 2018France wins the FIFA World Cup, and 🐓 becomes ubiquitous on French celebration tweets. The coq gaulois is the FFF's official emblem
5. 2024France reaches the Euros final and hosts the Paris Olympics, making 🐓 one of the most-used French sports emojis of the year

In France, 🐓 is quasi-official. The coq gaulois is the national symbol (alongside Marianne), appears on sports uniforms, and is the French Football Federation's emblem. The Élysée Palace's presidential seal includes a rooster. French users use 🐓 with national pride, especially around sporting events.

In Portugal, the Galo de Barcelos is the unofficial national mascot. The legend tells of a medieval pilgrim who was falsely accused of theft in Barcelos; when sentenced to hang, he predicted a roasted rooster on the judge's table would crow to prove his innocence. The rooster crowed. The symbol went from folk tale to tourism icon in the 1950s and now appears on every kind of Portuguese souvenir imaginable.

In China, 🐓 is the tenth animal of the zodiac. People born in 1957, 1969, 1981, 1993, 2005, 2017, and 2029 are Roosters, traditionally seen as observant, hardworking, courageous, and (fairly) vain. During Rooster years the emoji dominates Weibo and WeChat.

In Sri Lanka, a rooster is the symbol of the United National Party (UNP), one of the country's two historic major parties. Sri Lankan political Twitter uses 🐓 politically in ways most Western users wouldn't recognize.

In the Philippines, Thailand, and parts of Indonesia, cockfighting (sabong) remains culturally significant, though its legal status is contested. The emoji occasionally surfaces in sabong-adjacent content, which major social platforms restrict.

In the United States, 🐓 is primarily morning-coded, phallic slang, or Foghorn Leghorn nostalgia. Foghorn Leghorn, created by Warner Bros in 1946 and voiced by Mel Blanc for 43 years, is the template for loud, Southern, bombastic rooster energy in American pop culture.

• •France's rooster emblem, the coq gaulois, started as a Roman insult. Latin speakers made a pun on Gallus, meaning both "Gaul" and "rooster." The French embraced it.
• •Portugal's Galo de Barcelos comes from a medieval legend where a roasted rooster on a judge's table crowed to prove a pilgrim's innocence. The rooster is now Portugal's top souvenir icon.
• •Foghorn Leghorn, Warner Bros' loudest rooster, debuted in 1946 and was voiced by Mel Blanc for 43 years. His name combines "foghorn" (loudmouth) with "Leghorn" (an Italian chicken breed).
• •The rooster is the tenth animal of the Chinese zodiac. The next Rooster year is 2029 (Earth Rooster), with the last one being 2017 (Fire Rooster).
• •Pope Nicholas I issued a 9th-century decree requiring all Catholic churches to display a rooster on their steeples or domes, a tradition that produced the word "weathercock" long before "weathervane."
• •Socrates's last words, per Plato's Phaedo, were "we owe a cock to Asclepius." He asked his friend Crito to pay the ritual debt to the Greek god of medicine before dying.
• •The French Football Federation uses the coq gaulois as its official emblem. When Les Bleus won the 2018 FIFA World Cup, 🐓 exploded on French Twitter.
• •Cockfighting (sabong) is legal in the Philippines, Thailand, and Guam as of 2025, illegal in nearly every US state, India, Vietnam, and most of Europe.
• •Backyard chicken keeping boomed during COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020. US hatcheries reported sold-out inventory, and 🐓 search volume on Google quadrupled briefly in Q2 2020.

• •Foghorn Leghorn (1946 to present). Warner Bros' bombastic Southern rooster, created by Robert McKimson, starred in 29 Looney Tunes cartoons from 1946 to 1964. Voiced by Mel Blanc until 1989. Inspired by the radio character Senator Claghorn. "That's a joke, ah say, that's a joke, son."
• •Chanticleer (14th century to present). Chaucer's Canterbury Tales features the rooster Chanticleer in "The Nun's Priest's Tale." The character became the French folk rooster's name, and Disney made a version in the 1991 animated film Rock-a-Doodle.
• •Peter's denial (c. 30 AD). The Gospel passage where Peter denies Jesus three times before the rooster crows is the origin of roosters on Christian weathervanes. Arguably the single most culturally durable rooster in history.
• •France 1998 and 2018 World Cups. The coq gaulois is the FFF emblem. Both French World Cup wins produced mass 🐓 spikes on French social media. Les Bleus' nickname comes from their blue shirts, but their animal is the rooster.
• •Kellogg's Corn Flakes, Cornelius "Corny" Rooster. The cereal mascot since 1957, redesigned several times. Cornelius is arguably the most-viewed rooster in US consumer history.
• •PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) "Winner winner chicken dinner" (2017). The victory message for surviving PUBG matches popularized the phrase globally). It's technically about a hen, but chicken-adjacent content uses both 🐓 and 🐔.

• •Rooster is U+1F413U+1F413, added in Unicode 6.0 / Emoji 1.0 (2010). Part of the original 2010 batch.
• •Shortcodes: :rooster::rooster: on most platforms.
• •For Chinese zodiac features, pair with zodiac ordinals. Rooster is rank 10 of 12.
• •For French sports UIs, pair with U+1F1EB U+1F1F7U+1F1EB U+1F1F7 (🇫🇷) and sport-specific emojis.
• •Emoji Kitchen supports 🐓 mashups on Android. It blends interestingly with 🦆, 🐣, and 🦃.

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