Shrimp Emoji

A pink or orange shrimp (or prawn, depending on what you grew up calling it) rendered in side profile. Emojipedia shows most vendors drawing a curled tail, antennae, and small legs, closer to a cooked peel-and-eat shrimp than a living one.

🦐 does three very different jobs online. First: it's the seafood emoji, standing in for sushi, poke bowls, shrimp cocktail, Bubba Gump lists, and any cooking content involving a shrimp on the plate. Second: it's one of the oldest internet slang emojis for a small penis, a shorthand that predates the emoji itself and is still the first definition on Urban Dictionary. #shrimpgang on Reddit and Twitter turned that into self-deprecating pride, adjacent to the short-king movement. Third: shrimp has become an unexpected meme protagonist. PBS covered 'shrimp raves' on TikTok featuring Cardinal Sulawesi shrimp "dancing" to EDM, and SpongeBob's Bubble Bass ordering meme kept the emoji in rotation.

Search interest for 🦐 nearly tripled from 2020 to 2026 (22 to 64 on Google Trends), outpacing lobster and tracking close to crab. It's one of the quietly winning food emojis of the decade.

🦐 shows up in four main lanes.

Seafood and sushi. Restaurant menus, grocery hauls, poke bowl photos. Shrimp is 38% of all US seafood consumption (more than tuna, tilapia, Alaska pollock, cod and crab combined), so the emoji has a huge everyday user base. Caption: 🦐🍜 or 🍣🦐 for a poke bowl, 🔥🦐🧄 for garlic shrimp.

Small penis / self-deprecation. Men use it ironically on themselves (#shrimpgang), and people use it to mock 'small d-energy' in replies. Know this before you send it in earnest. A girl tagging your photo 🦐 is not praising your seafood palate.

Short king / size jokes. Beyond genitals, 🦐 also gets used for being short, tiny, or 'shrimpy.' Sometimes affectionate (a 5'2" friend's Instagram bio), sometimes cutting. The Urban Dictionary entry calls out both readings.

Meme protagonist. Shrimp memes exploded in late 2021, kicked off by a tweet about a restaurant called 'It's Just Shrimps.' Shrimp earrings, glass shrimp vessels, shrimp nail art, wooden shrimp bands, the whole aesthetic of being 'shrimp-pilled' took over aesthetic Twitter.

🦐 joined Unicode in 2016 as part of a big food and animal expansion that included 🦋 butterfly, 🦀 crab, 🦐 shrimp, 🦑 squid, 🥓 bacon, and 🥑 avocado. The push came from Japanese mobile carriers wanting parity with existing 🍣 🍤 sushi imagery, and from a growing demand for underrepresented foods from places like Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Mediterranean.

The fried shrimp emoji 🍤 predated it by six years. Japanese cuisine's prominence in early emoji sets (designed at NTT DoCoMo and KDDI) meant tempura got in first. The live/raw shrimp 🦐 closed the gap.

The slang load arrived almost immediately. 'Shrimp' for 'small person' dates back centuries (the OED has citations from the 14th century), and the size-joke meaning of 🦐 latched on during the mid-2010s Tumblr/Twitter emoji-slang boom. By 2018, the small-penis reading was dominant enough on Urban Dictionary that brands started avoiding 🦐 in casual marketing posts.

The memeification arrived in late 2021 with nenzumi_ningen's viral tweet about a restaurant called 'It's Just Shrimps.' That kicked off a whole 'shrimp-pilled' aesthetic, and by 2026 🦐 is still riding that wave, with viral TikTok shrimp raves and 'shormp' (misspelled shrimp) catchphrases.

Approved in Unicode 9.0 (2016) as U+1F990U+1F990 SHRIMP. Added to Emoji 3.0. Distinct from 🍤 fried shrimp (🍤 is Unicode 6.0, 2010), which shows battered tempura. Most platforms depict 🦐 curled with antennae visible. Samsung and Microsoft have updated the design more times than most food emojis, responding to user complaints that early versions looked 'too realistic' or 'too cartoon.'

• •Mantis shrimp have up to 16 photoreceptors (humans have three) and can detect circularly polarized light, a wavelength property no other known animal sees. Despite the hardware, they're actually not great at discriminating between colors.
• •Shrimp accounts for 38% of all seafood consumed in the US, more than tuna, tilapia, Alaska pollock, cod, and crab combined.
• •The global shrimp market hit $71.87B in 2024 and is projected to reach $105B by 2033. 80% of farmed production is a single species, whiteleg shrimp.
• •In Japan, odori ebi ('dancing shrimp') is a nigiri delicacy where the shrimp is decapitated seconds before serving, and the tail continues to twitch on the rice.
• •Pistol shrimp snap their claw so fast it creates a cavitation bubble reaching temperatures near the surface of the sun (~4,700°C) for a microsecond, and a shockwave that stuns prey.
• •The 'shrimp on the barbie' catchphrase was a 1984 Australian tourism ad aimed at Americans. Australians actually say 'prawn.'
• •Bubba Blue's shrimp list in Forrest Gump has 21 distinct shrimp preparations. The movie inspired the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. restaurant chain, which opened in Monterey in 1996.
• •The slang use of 🦐 as a small-penis emoji is old enough that Urban Dictionary's primary definition has been that meaning since 2018. Brands avoid it in casual posts.
• •The Cardinal Sulawesi shrimp that go viral in 'shrimp rave' TikToks are critically endangered, found only in Indonesia's Lake Matano.

• •Forrest Gump / Bubba's shrimp monologue (1994): Bubba Blue's extended shrimp recipe list ('shrimp is the fruit of the sea') is one of the most recited movie quotes in American pop culture and spawned the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. restaurant chain in 1996.
• •SpongeBob / Bubble Bass (1999): Bubble Bass's Double Triple Bossy Deluxe order is a long-running copypasta meme, frequently rewritten with increasingly absurd shrimp variations. The 'YOU FORGOT MY PICKLES' tongue reveal is one of the most-GIFed SpongeBob moments.
• •Shrimp rave (TikTok, 2023–): The @shrimplybeautiful account on TikTok films Cardinal Sulawesi shrimp appearing to dance in sync to EDM. PBS coverage brought attention to the species' endangered status in Lake Matano, Indonesia.
• •'It's Just Shrimps' tweet (Dec 2021): @nenzumi_ningen's viral tweet about a restaurant called 'It's Just Shrimps' kicked off the modern shrimp-pilled aesthetic movement: shrimp earrings, glass shrimp vessels, shrimp tattoos, shrimp nail art.
• •Paul Hogan 'shrimp on the barbie' (1984): The Australian Tourist Commission's ad with Paul Hogan 'slipping an extra shrimp on the barbie' for Americans was specifically American-coded (Australians say prawn). It defined the US image of Australia for a generation.