Round Pushpin Emoji

A round pushpin: a pin with a small round white or silver shaft and a red round head, standing upright at roughly 90°. Approved as part of Unicode 6.0 in October 2010 as U+1F4CDU+1F4CD. Officially a pushpin (the kind you stick in a corkboard), but in practice 📍 is the location emoji.

The "📍[Place]" format — "📍Tokyo," "📍your favorite coffee shop," "📍right here" — has been a default text geotag on Instagram, TikTok, and X for years. The pin shape lines up visually with the Google Maps red marker designed by Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen in 2005, which made the symbol globally legible long before the emoji existed. (Strictly speaking, Google's marker is a teardrop and 📍 is a round-head pin, but most people read both as "pin on a map.")

📍 is the location emoji. Its dominant use is the "📍[Place]" format: "📍Paris," "📍Bali," "📍second from the left." The convention is so entrenched that 📍 before any place name is universally read as "this is where I am / where this happened."

Beyond literal locations, 📍 marks important points in a list, pins key information at the top of a post, and references Google Maps or Apple Maps in product copy. In business contexts, brands use 📍 in store directories, contact pages, event posts, and "come visit" announcements.

A quieter use: in text instructions, "📍right here" or "📍this part" can act as a verbal pointer when you can't draw an arrow. It's the closest emoji to "see this exact spot."

📍 was approved in Unicode 6.0 in October 2010, part of the original 722-emoji set imported from Japanese carrier symbols. As designed, it's a round-headed pushpin standing on a flat surface — the kind you'd stick into a corkboard, drawn from above.

The modern meaning came from somewhere else entirely: Google Maps' iconic red teardrop marker, designed by Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen in 2005 and used continuously ever since. Apple Maps, MapQuest, Foursquare, and just about every map product since has used some flavor of the same teardrop or round-headed pin. The Google marker became the official Maps logo in 2020 and was even acquired by MoMA for its permanent collection in 2014.

When 📍 shipped in 2010, it was the only existing emoji that even vaguely resembled the universal map-pin shape, so it inherited the meaning by default. Within a few years, the "📍[place]" caption format took over Instagram, then TikTok, then X. The original pushpin meaning is largely vestigial.

1. 2005Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen designs the red teardrop marker for Google Maps. It becomes the universal symbol for "location" and seeds the cultural meaning 📍 inherits.↗
2. 2010Round pushpin approved in Unicode 6.0, part of the original 722-emoji set.
3. 2014MoMA acquires a physical version of the Google Maps pin for its permanent collection.↗
4. 2015The "📍City Name" geotag format takes over Instagram captions and Stories.
5. 2020Google Maps' red pin officially becomes the Google Maps app logo, deepening the cultural shorthand 📍 carries.

• •📍 was part of the original 722-emoji set in Unicode 6.0 (October 2010).
• •The Google Maps red marker, designed by Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen in 2005, is what gave 📍 its universal location meaning. Strictly the marker is a teardrop and 📍 is a round-head pin, but the cultural mapping stuck.
• •The Google Maps pin was acquired by MoMA in 2014 for its permanent collection, recognizing it as a piece of design history.
• •The marker became the official Google Maps app logo in 2020, deepening the visual shorthand 📍 carries.
• •The "📍[Location]" format works on Instagram, TikTok, and X without any platform feature. It's pure user convention.
• •📍 is so locked into "location" that the original corkboard-pushpin meaning has effectively disappeared from emoji usage online.
• •The Google Maps marker is protected under a U.S. design patent as a "teardrop-shaped marker icon including a shadow."