Sleepy Face Emoji
U+1F62A:sleepy:About Sleepy Face 😪
Sleepy Face () is part of the Smileys & Emotion group in Unicode. Added in Unicode E0.6. Type on GitHub and Slack to use it. Click copy above to grab it, paste it anywhere.
Works in iMessage, WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, Instagram, Twitter, Gmail, and every app that supports Unicode.
Often associated with crying, face, good, and 6 more keywords.
Meaning varies across cultures, see cultural notes below.
Scroll down for the full story: meaning, trends, combos, and more.
How it looks
What does it mean?
A yellow face with closed eyes, mouth slightly open, and a blue bubble coming from its nose. That bubble is the key to everything about this emoji, and most people get it wrong.
The bubble is a snot bubble. In Japanese manga and anime, a snot bubble swelling and shrinking from a character's nose is a visual shorthand for sleep. The character is so deeply asleep that a mucus bubble forms with their breathing, growing larger with each exhale and popping when they wake up. It's cute, comedic, and instantly recognizable to anyone who's watched anime.
The problem: 78% of Americans think it's a tear. A 2015 YouGov survey found that 780 out of 1,000 Americans interpreted 😪 as "sad" or "crying," making it one of the most misunderstood emoji in the keyboard. You send "sleepy," they read "sad." A cultural convention that's crystal clear in Japan is invisible in the West.
😪 was part of Unicode 6.0 (2010) under the name "Sleepy Face." But because most Western users don't recognize the snot bubble convention, 😪 functions more as an ambiguous face that might mean tired, sad, sick, or bored depending on who's reading it.
😪 leads a double life depending on your cultural context.
For Japanese users and anime/manga fans, 😪 means exactly what it says: sleepy. "Class is so boring 😪" or "Staying up too late again 😪" or "Nap time 😪." The snot bubble is a beloved visual trope that's been in manga for decades. Using 😪 is like referencing an inside joke that a billion manga readers understand.
For most Western users, 😪 reads as sad or crying. The blue droplet looks like a tear running down the face. "Missing you 😪" or "Bad day 😪" or "When you can't get what you want 😪." This misreading is so widespread that it's essentially become a valid meaning through sheer usage.
There's also a boredom reading. "This meeting 😪" or "Another Monday 😪." Here it plays on both "bored to sleep" and "bored to tears." The ambiguity becomes a feature rather than a bug.
Emojipedia's Emojiology article notes that 😪 is "one of the most misinterpreted emojis." Unlike the 😄/😬 grimace confusion (which was a platform rendering issue), 😪's confusion is cultural. The design is consistent across platforms. The interpretation depends entirely on whether the viewer recognizes a snot bubble.
Officially: sleepy/tired. The blue droplet is a snot bubble, a manga convention for sleep. But 78% of Americans read it as a tear, making 😪 one of the most misunderstood emoji. In practice, it means either 'tired' (if you know manga) or 'sad' (if you don't).
The most misread emoji in Unicode
The sleep and rest emoji family
What it means from...
Probably means they're tired, but the sad misreading might apply. 'Up too late thinking about things 😪' could be sleepy or could be emotionally affected. If you're not sure, respond to both possible meanings: 'Get some sleep! 😊' covers tiredness, and 'Everything okay?' covers sadness.
Standard tiredness or boredom. 'This lecture 😪' or 'I need a nap 😪.' Between friends, the context usually clarifies whether it's sleepy or sad. Don't overthink it.
Risky. 😪 in a work context could read as 'this is boring' (disrespectful) or 'I'm sad' (concerning). If you want to say you're tired at work, 'Long day' with a 😴 is clearer and safer.
Depends on their cultural background. If they watch anime, they're probably tired. If they don't, they might be sad. Context helps: 'Up too late 😪' = tired. 'Missing you 😪' = sad. If unsure, respond in a way that covers both: 'Get some rest, I'm here if you need to talk.'
Emoji combos
Origin story
The snot bubble (鼻提灯, hana chōchin, literally "nose lantern") is one of manga's oldest visual conventions for depicting sleep. A character falls asleep, and a translucent bubble forms from their nostril, inflating and deflating with each breath. It pops when they wake up. The trope is cute, comedic, and immediately understood by anyone familiar with manga.
When Shigetaka Kurita and the Japanese mobile carriers designed the first emoji sets in the late 1990s, they drew heavily from manga visual language. 😪 is a direct import of the snot bubble trope. In the context of Japanese visual culture, there's nothing ambiguous about it: it means sleeping.
The trouble started when emoji went global. Unicode standardized emoji for worldwide use in 2010. Suddenly, users in the US, Europe, and Latin America encountered a face with a blue droplet and no context for what that droplet meant. Without the manga convention, the droplet looks like a tear. A 2015 YouGov survey confirmed what anyone could guess: Americans overwhelmingly read 😪 as sad or crying.
This isn't a design failure. It's a localization failure. The emoji was designed for one cultural context and deployed in all of them. The snot bubble works perfectly in Japan and bewilders everyone else. It's the same problem as 😄's grimace confusion, except instead of a platform rendering issue, it's a cultural literacy issue.
Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as SLEEPY FACE. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. The design directly references the snot bubble trope from Japanese manga and anime, where a mucus bubble swelling from a sleeping character's nose indicates deep sleep. This makes 😪 one of the most culturally specific emoji in the standard, designed with Japanese visual conventions that don't translate to Western interpretation.
89 years of the nose lantern
- 1937 · Norakuro animated short: The earliest confirmed animated snot bubble appears in a [Norakuro short](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norakuro) by Suihō Tagawa. The convention was almost certainly already present in 1920s and 1930s printed manga; Norakuro is simply the oldest on-screen example anyone has documented.
- 1950s–1990s · The trope calcifies: Hana chōchin (鼻提灯, "nose lantern") becomes standard manga iconography, sitting alongside the anger cross-vein, the sweat drop, and the sparkly eyes. By the Dragon Ball era it's instantly readable to any Japanese kid.
- Late 1990s · Kurita's emoji set: Shigetaka Kurita and the Japanese mobile carriers build the first emoji sets pulling heavily from manga visual language. A sleepy face with a snot bubble is the obvious choice. In Japan, there's no ambiguity.
- October 2010 · Unicode 6.0: 😪 ships globally as [U+1F62A SLEEPY FACE](https://emojipedia.org/sleepy-face). Millions of users outside Japan encounter the snot bubble for the first time. No one explains it.
- June 2015 · The YouGov survey: A [1,000-person YouGov survey](https://blog.emojipedia.org/emojiology-sleepy-face/) finds 78% of Americans read 😪 as sad or crying, the highest agreement on any emoji tested. The cultural gap gets a number.
- 2020–2023 · Gen Z repurposes it: TikTok and bed rotting turn 😪 into a sarcastic boredom emoji. Neither Japanese nor Western readers own it anymore, [Gen Z does](https://www.dictionary.com/articles/gen-z-explains-emoji-to-millennials).
- September 2024 · The successor arrives: Unicode 16.0 approves [ Face with Bags Under Eyes](https://emojipedia.org/face-with-bags-under-eyes). Its keywords include "sleepy, tired, exhausted." Fourteen years after 😪 shipped, the keyboard finally has a tired face Western users can read without a manga primer.
Around the world
The snot bubble divide is one of the sharpest cultural gaps in the emoji standard.
In Japan and among manga/anime fans worldwide, 😪's snot bubble is immediately recognizable as a sleep indicator. It's cute and comedic. Nobody misreads it.
In the US and Europe, 78% of people read the droplet as a tear. A 2015 YouGov survey found this was the highest agreement rate for any emoji they tested. Americans are more confident that 😪 means "sad" than they are about what most emoji mean.
The result: 😪 is one of the few emoji that means fundamentally different things depending on the receiver's cultural background. A Japanese user sends "tired." A Western user reads "sad." Neither is wrong. They're just working from different visual vocabularies.
A snot bubble (鼻提灯, 'nose lantern' in Japanese). In manga and anime, a mucus bubble forming from a sleeping character's nose is a visual shorthand for deep sleep. It swells and shrinks with breathing and pops when they wake up. Most Western users don't know this convention and read it as a tear.
Because the snot bubble looks like a tear to anyone unfamiliar with manga conventions. A 2015 YouGov survey found this was the highest agreement rate for any emoji. The design is culturally specific to Japan but deployed globally without localization.
The earliest documented animated snot bubble is in a 1937 Norakuro short by Suihō Tagawa. The convention is almost certainly older in printed manga, but 1937 is the oldest confirmed animated example. By the time Unicode added 😪 in 2010, the trope was already 73 years old in Japanese visual culture.
Emoji sentiment DNA: why 😪 is the weirdest face in the keyboard
How 482 humans read 😪 in 13 languages
The data says both sides are right
The comparison that makes this weird
| Novak score | Tagged positive | Tagged negative | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 😪 Sleepy Face | −0.08 | 35.1% | 43.1% |
| 😴 Sleeping Face | −0.08 | 34.1% | 42.2% |
| 😢 Crying Face | +0.01 | 39.1% | 38.4% |
| 😥 Sad but Relieved | +0.12 | 43.9% | 31.7% |
The Snot Bubble Is Losing: 😪 vs 😴
Often confused with
😢 has a visible tear and a frown (sadness). 😪 has a snot bubble and a sleepy expression (tiredness). But because most Western users read 😪's bubble as a tear, the two emoji can overlap in perceived meaning. If you want to communicate sadness clearly, use 😢. If you want tiredness, pair 😪 with 💤 to remove ambiguity.
😢 has a visible tear and a frown (sadness). 😪 has a snot bubble and a sleepy expression (tiredness). But because most Western users read 😪's bubble as a tear, the two emoji can overlap in perceived meaning. If you want to communicate sadness clearly, use 😢. If you want tiredness, pair 😪 with 💤 to remove ambiguity.
😴 has ZZZ floating from its head (universally understood as sleep). 😪 has a snot bubble (culturally specific to manga). 😴 is unambiguous. 😪 is ambiguous. If you want to say "tired" to someone who might not know manga conventions, 😴 is the safer choice.
😴 has ZZZ floating from its head (universally understood as sleep). 😪 has a snot bubble (culturally specific to manga). 😴 is unambiguous. 😪 is ambiguous. If you want to say "tired" to someone who might not know manga conventions, 😴 is the safer choice.
🥱 is actively yawning (tired, bored, about to fall asleep). 😪 is already half-asleep with a snot bubble forming. 🥱 is the moment before sleep. 😪 is the moment of sleep. 🥱 was the most searched of the three in 2020 but its novelty has faded.
🥱 is actively yawning (tired, bored, about to fall asleep). 😪 is already half-asleep with a snot bubble forming. 🥱 is the moment before sleep. 😪 is the moment of sleep. 🥱 was the most searched of the three in 2020 but its novelty has faded.
😥 (sad but relieved face) has a single tear and a small frown. It looks very similar to 😪 at small sizes. Both have a single blue droplet near the face. The difference: 😥 is sad with a tear. 😪 is sleepy with a snot bubble. Good luck telling them apart at 16px.
😥 (sad but relieved face) has a single tear and a small frown. It looks very similar to 😪 at small sizes. Both have a single blue droplet near the face. The difference: 😥 is sad with a tear. 😪 is sleepy with a snot bubble. Good luck telling them apart at 16px.
😴 has ZZZ floating from its head (universally understood as sleeping). 😪 has a snot bubble (understood as sleeping in Japan, as crying everywhere else). If you want to communicate tiredness without cultural ambiguity, 😴 is the safer choice.
It's trying to. was approved in Unicode 16.0 (September 2024) and won the 2024 World Emoji Awards for Most Anticipated. Its Unicode keywords include 'sleepy, tired, fatigued, exhausted', the unambiguous tired face Western users have needed since 😪 shipped in 2010. Early usage data suggests is being adopted for the 'exhausted / burned out' meaning while 😪 is drifting toward Gen Z 'bored / disappointed' territory.
Do's and don'ts
- ✗Don't assume Western recipients will read it as 'sleepy' (78% read it as 'sad')
- ✗Don't use it when you mean 😢 (crying) or 😔 (sad), the ambiguity creates confusion
- ✗Don't use it in formal contexts where misinterpretation matters
- ✗Don't use it to respond to someone sharing personal news (the sad misreading could feel dismissive or the sleepy reading could feel rude)
Gen Z has shifted 😪 away from its Japanese 'sleepy' meaning and its Western 'sad' misreading into a third interpretation: mild disappointment, bored resignation, or sarcastic low energy. 'Class tomorrow 😪.' 'Monday again 😪.' It's the emoji equivalent of a deadpan eye roll. Pairs well with the bed rotting aesthetic, where the vibe is horizontal and vaguely defeated.
Caption ideas
Aesthetic sets
Type it as text
Fun facts
- •😪's blue droplet is a snot bubble (鼻提灯), one of manga's oldest visual conventions for sleep. The bubble swells and shrinks with a character's breathing and pops when they wake up. It's been in manga for decades.
- •A 2015 YouGov survey found that 780 out of 1,000 Americans interpreted 😪 as "sad" or "crying." That was the highest agreement rate for any emoji they tested. Almost everyone agreed, and almost everyone was wrong.
- •😪 is one of the most culturally specific emoji in the standard. It was designed using Japanese manga visual conventions that don't translate to Western interpretation. Same face, different meaning, depending on whether you've watched anime. Search '😪' on LetsEmoji to see how different platforms render the snot bubble.
- •Google Trends shows 😴 (ZZZ sleeping) overtaking 😪 (snot bubble sleepy) in search interest since Q3 2023. The culturally ambiguous face is losing to the universally understood one.
- •The word for snot bubble in Japanese is 鼻提灯 (hana chōchin), literally "nose lantern." It's considered cute and comedic in manga, which is a different aesthetic from how most cultures view nasal discharge.
- •The earliest known animated snot bubble appears in a 1937 Norakuro short, a Japanese cartoon series about a stray black dog soldier by Suihō Tagawa. Unicode eventually standardized the convention 73 years later. The trope was already 89 years old by 2026.
- •The peer-reviewed Emoji Sentiment Ranking by Novak et al. analyzed 70,000 tweets in 13 languages with 83 human annotators. Out of 482 labeled uses of 😪, exactly 35.1% were tagged positive. That's only four points behind 😢, which has "crying" in its name.
- •Unicode 16.0 (September 2024) introduced Face with Bags Under Eyes, which won the 2024 World Emoji Awards for Most Anticipated. Its Unicode keywords are literally "bags, bored, exhausted, eyes, face, fatigued, late, sleepy, tired, weary." Fourteen years after 😪 shipped, Unicode finally gave Western users an unambiguous tired face.
- •Gen Z has quietly stopped using 😪 to mean sleepy at all. Dictionary.com and emoji lexicon sites now document it as a Gen Z marker for mild disappointment or sarcastic boredom. The snot bubble has drifted through three distinct meanings in 16 years: sleep (Japan), sadness (West, 2010s), boredom (Gen Z, 2020s).
Common misinterpretations
- •The fundamental misinterpretation: 78% of Americans read the snot bubble as a tear. This means if you send 😪 meaning "I'm tired," there's a 4-in-5 chance your American recipient reads "I'm sad." The cultural gap is vast.
- •Some people use 😪 for illness (the droplet looks like a runny nose). This is actually closer to the original snot bubble concept than the tear reading, but it's still not what the emoji was designed for.
- •Using 😪 in response to someone's story can land badly either way. If they shared good news and you meant "I'm tired" → they read "I'm sad about your good news" (rude). If they shared bad news and you meant "I'm sad" → at least the misread aligns, but 😢 would be clearer.
Trivia
For developers
- •😪 is . Unicode name: SLEEPY FACE. Common shortcodes: (Slack, Discord, GitHub). Part of Unicode 6.0 (2010).
- •For emoji sentiment analysis, 😪 is problematic. Its intended meaning is neutral/mildly negative (tired), but 78% of Americans read it as strongly negative (sad/crying). If your app serves Western users, treat 😪 as potentially negative. If your app serves Japanese users, treat it as neutral.
- •If building an emoji picker with categories, 😪 belongs in both 'sleepy/tired' AND 'sad/emotional' categories for Western users. The misread is so prevalent it's become a valid meaning.
Literally 'nose lantern.' It's the Japanese manga convention of a snot bubble forming from a sleeping character's nose. It's considered cute and comedic in Japanese visual culture, which is a different aesthetic from how most cultures view nasal mucus.
The Novak Emoji Sentiment Ranking, the standard academic dataset for this, scores 😪 at −0.08 on a −1 to +1 scale. That's barely negative, not strongly negative. The underlying breakdown from 482 human-labeled tweets: 43.1% negative, 21.9% neutral, 35.1% positive. If your app treats 😪 as uniformly sad, you're mislabeling more than half the data.
See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.
The successor, and where 😪 actually lives now
is the tired face Unicode should have shipped in 2010
😪's real job now: bed rotting and sarcastic Monday
What does 😪 mean to you?
Select all that apply
- Sleepy Face Emoji (emojipedia.org)
- Emojiology: Sleepy Face (Emojipedia Blog) (blog.emojipedia.org)
- What 😪 means in texting (SweetyHigh) (sweetyhigh.com)
- Sleepy Face (Emojis.wiki) (emojis.wiki)
- Sentiment of Emojis (Novak et al., PLOS ONE 2015) (journals.plos.org)
- Emoji Sentiment Ranking dataset (kt.ijs.si)
- Norakuro (Wikipedia) (en.wikipedia.org)
- Face with Bags Under Eyes Emoji (Emojipedia) (emojipedia.org)
- What's New In Unicode 16.0 (Emojipedia Blog) (blog.emojipedia.org)
- Bed Rotting Tops TikTok Trends (AASM) (aasm.org)
- Snot Bubble convention (Japanese with Anime) (japanesewithanime.com)
- How Gen Z Uses Emoji (Dictionary.com) (dictionary.com)
- Twitter, time and emotions (PMC) (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
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