Sandwich Emoji

A layered sandwich with lettuce, tomato, cheese, and (on most platforms) deli meat between two slices of bread. The Unicode Consortium approved it in 2017 as part of a big food emoji push, and the proposal argued that despite the existence of a "Food and Drink" category, the massive cross-cultural significance of sandwiches still had no representation on the emoji keyboard.

People use 🥪 mostly to talk about food: lunch plans, what they're eating, deli runs, meal prep. But there's a second life to it. "Sandwiched between" is an English idiom that predates digital communication by centuries, and 🥪 has inherited that figurative meaning in texts. Caught between two deadlines? Stuck between two opinions? People drop 🥪 to convey that squeeze.

The word "sandwich" itself comes from John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, who in 1762 reportedly asked for meat between bread slices so he wouldn't have to leave the card table. The first recorded use of the word appeared in historian Edward Gibbon's diary on November 24, 1762. Of course, people had been putting things between bread for thousands of years before that. Hillel the Elder was wrapping lamb and bitter herbs in matzoh during the first century BC. The Earl just got the naming rights.

Americans eat roughly 300 million sandwiches every day. The global sandwich market is valued at over $172 billion and growing. That's a lot of cultural weight for one little emoji to carry, and it does the job.

🥪 peaks every November 3 for National Sandwich Day, when #NationalSandwichDay racks up tens of thousands of posts and every chain restaurant runs a promo. On TikTok and Instagram, sandwich content is a genre of its own: stacking videos, ASMR cutting shots, deli reviews, and "rate my sandwich" slideshows. Food bloggers use 🥪 as a staple in bio sections and post captions. It shows up in meal-planning group chats more than any dramatic context. On X, 🥪 often appears in philosophical food debates ("Is a hot dog a sandwich?") and in the annual discourse about what does or doesn't count as a sandwich.

The sandwich emoji proposal (L2/16-372) was submitted to the Unicode Consortium in 2016 as part of an omnibus food emoji proposal that also included pie, pretzel, broccoli, coconut, and dumpling. The argument was straightforward: sandwiches are eaten in virtually every country on earth, there was no way to represent them with existing emoji, and the term was one of the most frequently requested food additions.

The Consortium approved 🥪 as part of Unicode 10.0 in June 2017, bundled into Emoji 5.0. Apple shipped it in iOS 11.1 later that year alongside 239 other new emojis.

But the real origin story goes back 264 years. On November 24, 1762, historian Edward Gibbon wrote in his diary about seeing men eating "a bit of cold meat, or a Sandwich" at a London club. The name stuck because of John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, a British statesman and notorious gambler who supposedly asked for meat between bread slices to avoid leaving the card table. The truth is probably more mundane: Montagu was a workaholic who ate at his desk, and the bread kept his papers clean. Either way, he didn't invent the concept. People have been wrapping food in flatbread since ancient times. He just got his name on it.

1. 2016Sandwich emoji proposed to Unicode Consortium as L2/16-372
2. 2017Approved in Unicode 10.0 / Emoji 5.0. Apple ships in iOS 11.1, Google in Android 8.1
3. 2018Samsung debuts its version in Experience 9.0 with a distinctive flat design
4. 2020Facebook introduces a cut-in-half design with diagonal slices and skewers

• •47% of American adults eat a sandwich on any given day. That's roughly 300 million sandwiches consumed daily across the country.
• •The word "sandwich" was first recorded in Edward Gibbon's diary on November 24, 1762, but people had been eating bread-wrapped foods for at least 2,000 years before that.
• •National Sandwich Day falls on November 3, the birthday of John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich. Google Trends data shows a consistent annual spike in Q4 every year.
• •The Cube Rule of Food Classification argues that a hot dog is actually a taco, pizza is toast, and lasagna is a multi-decker sandwich. It went viral in 2018 and still gets cited in food debates.
• •Sandwich consumers eat 278 more calories per day than non-consumers on average. Sandwiches account for about 12% of total daily energy intake in the U.S.
• •The global sandwich market is valued at over $172 billion and projected to reach $271 billion by 2034.
• •Facebook's sandwich emoji is the only major platform design that shows the sandwich cut diagonally into two triangular halves with skewers in each piece.
• •🥪 was part of the Emoji 5.0 class of 2017, which also included 🥟 Dumpling, 🥧 Pie, 🥨 Pretzel, 🥦 Broccoli, and 🥥 Coconut.