Spider Emoji
U+1F577:spider:About Spider 🕷️
Spider () is part of the Animals & Nature group in Unicode. Added in Unicode E0.7. 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.
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 black spider shown from above, eight legs splayed. 🕷️ is the most seasonally volatile bug emoji in the set. Halloween spikes it in Q4 every year, Spider-Man film releases create multi-quarter peaks, and a single viral huntsman photo can push it to the top of the insect chart for a week.
In most posts, 🕷️ means one of three things: Spider-Man (the $9B+ film franchise), Halloween decor energy, or actual spider panic. Our Google Trends data for the bug family shows 🕷️ peaked at 97 in Q2 2023, the quarter Across the Spider-Verse launched, the highest single-quarter value of any bug emoji in the six-year window.
On goth and alt TikTok it's a year-round aesthetic anchor. 🕷️🖤 pairs with black eyeliner tutorials and Doc Marten photos the way 🌸 pairs with cottagecore. Spiders also carry a strong arachnophobia charge: between 3% and 15% of the global population has clinically significant spider fear, which means 🕷️ in a text lands very differently depending on who's reading.
Three use modes and they barely overlap.
Spider-Man mode. Year-round, driven by Marvel fandom. 🕷️ spikes for every major franchise milestone: No Way Home (Dec 2021, $1.9B global) pushed Q1 2022 searches to 74. Across the Spider-Verse (June 2023) drove Q2 2023 to 97. Beyond Spider-Verse dates will trigger the next spike.
Halloween mode. October drives a reliable Q4 spike every year. 🕷️🕸️🎃👻 is the classic four-emoji Halloween stack. Stores, party accounts, and Nightmare Before Christmas Twitter all lean on it from late September through November.
Panic mode. 'THERE'S A 🕷️ IN MY ROOM' is its own internet genre. Aussies get the most mileage here: the Charlotte huntsman spider photo from Queensland animal rescue Barnyard Betty's went viral in 2016 and keeps getting re-shared every few years.
Usually Spider-Man, Halloween decor, or a reaction to an actual spider. Secondary meanings: goth aesthetic, Charlotte's Web reference, or the Anansi trickster. Pairs almost automatically with 🕸️.
The Halloween Emoji Family
The Bug & Insect Family
What it means from...
'Came home to this 🕷️' is the universal spider-in-the-apartment panic-text. Picture attached, group chat in chaos. Also: 'tickets locked for Spider-Verse night 🕷️🕷️🕷️.'
Rare. Sometimes used in flirty 'let me be your Spider-Man' MCU-nerd territory. Almost never as an actual spider.
Mostly Halloween office-party coordination. 'Spooky stuff due by Friday 🕷️🕸️.' Occasionally a debugging reference in web-dev teams ('the whole request is caught in 🕷️ middleware').
'Come get this out of the kitchen' energy. Regional: Australian families have completely different reactions ('oh that's just Harold, he eats the moths') .
What people mean when they send 🕷️
Emoji combos
Bug emoji search interest over time
Origin story
🕷️ was approved as U+1F577 "SPIDER" in Unicode 7.0 on June 16, 2014, alongside its companion 🕸️ spider web. Both came from the Wingdings font that Microsoft shipped in 1990. When Unicode looked at which symbols designers were actually using across platforms, Wingdings was full of emoji-ready glyphs that had never been standardized. The spider was one of them.
For the first four years, 🕷️ rendered as a default text-style symbol (a flat spider outline) on most systems. Unicode 9.0 in 2016 gave it the emoji presentation selector by default, and the colorful cartoon spiders showed up across platforms. Apple's version is a round-bodied black widow; Google's is a dark-brown tarantula; Samsung leans into a friendlier cartoon.
Spider-Man, the character who eventually defined the emoji's cultural footprint, was created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in Amazing Fantasy #15 in August 1962. The character predates the emoji by 52 years. Three major live-action film series (Raimi 2002-2007, Webb 2012-2014, MCU 2017-present) plus the Spider-Verse animated films have turned 🕷️ into shorthand for arguably the most valuable superhero property in entertainment.
Design history
- 1990Microsoft ships the spider symbol in the Wingdings font. Unicode later borrows from this set.
- 2014Approved as U+1F577 SPIDER in Unicode 7.0 (June 16, 2014), alongside companion 🕸️.↗
- 2016Unicode 9.0 adds default emoji presentation. 🕷️ switches from a flat text glyph to colorful cartoon designs across platforms.
- 2018Into the Spider-Verse releases (December 14, 2018), wins Best Animated Feature Oscar, reframes 🕷️ for a new generation around Miles Morales.
- 2021Spider-Man: No Way Home (December 17, 2021) hits $1.9B global, the first post-COVID billion-dollar movie. 🕷️ searches spike 72% quarter-over-quarter.↗
- 2023Across the Spider-Verse drops June 2, 2023. 🕷️ hits its highest single-quarter Google Trends value (97) in the bug family over the six-year window.↗
- 2023[Shocked Miles Morales meme](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/shocked-miles-morales) posted by @raflizi26 in June 2023 hits 24K retweets in 8 days, becomes a dominant reaction format.
Around the world
Australia
Australia has an entirely different relationship with 🕷️. Huntsman spiders routinely live in houses and are treated as free pest control. Charlotte the huntsman from Queensland's Barnyard Betty's Rescue went globally viral in 2015-2016 and has been re-shared every few years since. Australians post 🕷️ with affection far more often than fear.
United States
🕷️ reads as Spider-Man first, Halloween second, actual spider third. Driven by the Marvel-dominated pop-culture landscape and the fact that U.S. spiders are mostly harmless. Black widows and brown recluses exist but are rare; most spider-in-the-shower screams are about daddy longlegs.
Japan
In Japan, 蜘蛛 (kumo) has strong folklore ties. The Jorōgumo ("whore spider") is a shape-shifting yokai that appears as a beautiful woman and lures unsuspecting men. 🕷️ shows up in anime and horror-manga contexts more than in daily texting. Also a key motif in Demon Slayer's Spider Family arc.
Korea
Korean folklore holds that killing a spider in the morning brings bad luck, while seeing one in the evening is a sign of incoming good news. Korean speakers use 🕷️ with these beliefs roughly in mind, especially older generations.
Anansi cultures (West Africa, Caribbean)
In Akan and broader West African folklore, the spider Anansi is a trickster who carried all the world's wisdom in a pot. Anansi stories survived the Middle Passage and are still told across the Caribbean. 🕷️ in Jamaican, Haitian, and Ghanaian online communities often carries cleverness and resilience, not creepiness.
Halloween. 🕷️ is a standard spooky-season decoration emoji, alongside 🎃👻💀🕸️🦇. Google Trends shows a reliable Q4 bump every year. In 2021, Spider-Man: No Way Home stacked on top of Halloween and drove 🕷️ to 64 (vs ~41 in Q4 2020).
Huntsman spiders are huge, relatively common indoors, and mostly harmless. Many Australian households treat them as pest control and give them names. The Charlotte huntsman photo from Queensland's Barnyard Betty's Rescue has been viral repeatedly since 2015, usually with captions celebrating the roommate rather than fearing it.
The Spider-Man film franchise has grossed over $9 billion. Peter Parker and Miles Morales are arguably the most recognized fictional character names on the planet. Whenever a new Spider-Man film drops, 🕷️ usage spikes measurably; it outranks every other interpretation in our estimated distribution.
Often confused with
Spider web (also Unicode 7.0, 2014). Same family, but the empty web. Together 🕷️🕸️ = full Halloween set.
Spider web (also Unicode 7.0, 2014). Same family, but the empty web. Together 🕷️🕸️ = full Halloween set.
Scorpion. Eight legs too, but with pincers and a curved stinger tail. Related arachnid; different emotional valence.
Scorpion. Eight legs too, but with pincers and a curved stinger tail. Related arachnid; different emotional valence.
Crab. Eight legs but in water, claws forward, sideways movement.
Crab. Eight legs but in water, claws forward, sideways movement.
Ant. Six legs (not eight), with antennae. Smaller silhouette, no web association.
Ant. Six legs (not eight), with antennae. Smaller silhouette, no web association.
🕷️ is the spider itself (body plus eight legs). 🕸️ is the empty web, just the geometric pattern. Both shipped in Unicode 7.0 (2014). Together 🕷️🕸️ is the standard Halloween pairing; each works independently too.
Caption ideas
Fun facts
- •Spider-Man film franchise has grossed over $9 billion worldwide. 🕷️ is shorthand for arguably the most lucrative superhero property in entertainment.
- •Our Google Trends data shows 🕷️ peaked at 97 in Q2 2023, the quarter Across the Spider-Verse released. Highest single-quarter value of any bug emoji in the six-year window.
- •Arachnophobia affects 3% to 15% of the global population. 🕷️ in a text lands very differently depending on who's reading.
- •Spiders are not insects. They're arachnids, with eight legs and two body segments, unrelated to bees, ants, or flies. Emoji categorization groups them anyway.
- •The 'Charlotte' huntsman spider from Barnyard Betty's Rescue in Queensland is the most famous real-world spider on the internet, going viral in 2015 and re-viral roughly every 12-18 months since.
- •Spider-Man first appeared in Amazing Fantasy #15 in August 1962. The character predates the 🕷️ emoji by 52 years.
- •Only about 25 species of spiders have venom capable of causing serious illness in humans, out of roughly 50,000 known spider species. The rest are harmless to humans.
- •In Korean folklore, killing a morning spider is bad luck; evening spiders bring good news. Some older Korean families still follow the rule.
- •Anansi the spider is the oldest African trickster figure still in continuous storytelling, with oral tradition dating back to the Ashanti people of Ghana and surviving the Middle Passage to the Caribbean.
In pop culture
- •Spider-Man (1962, Stan Lee & Steve Ditko, Amazing Fantasy #15). Three live-action film franchises and the Spider-Verse animated series put 🕷️ at the center of Marvel marketing.
- •Charlotte's Web (E.B. White, 1952). The book that teaches a generation that spiders can be friends. 'Some pig' is still an instantly recognizable phrase.
- •Arachnophobia (1990, dir. Frank Marshall). The definitive mass-spider horror-comedy. Its title gave the clinical term pop-culture traction.
- •Boris the Spider by The Who (1966). Still a bar-jukebox pull; 'creepy crawly, creepy crawly' is the kind of melody that lodges in your head.
- •Anansi the spider, West African and Caribbean trickster. Folklorist Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys (2005) reintroduced him to a mainstream audience.
- •Attack on Titan's Demon Slayer-style Spider Family arc. Japanese anime loves spider monsters.
- •Harry Potter and Aragog the Acromantula. Ron Weasley's arachnophobia is the reason a generation of British and American readers still flinch at 🕷️.
Trivia
For developers
- •🕷️ is with variation selector in most platforms (). Unicode 7.0 (2014).
- •Common shortcodes: (Slack, Discord, GitHub).
- •Default text-style presentation before 2016; emoji-style became default in Unicode 9.0. If you see the flat black outline, you're on an old platform.
- •HTML entity: or . URL-encoded: .
Technically no. Spiders are arachnids, with eight legs and two body segments. Insects (ants, bees, flies) have six legs and three segments. Emoji categorization groups them together anyway because people think of them as bugs.
See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.
When you send 🕷️, what do you usually mean?
Select all that apply
- Spider Emoji (Emojipedia) (emojipedia.org)
- Spider-Man in film (Wikipedia) (wikipedia.org)
- Spider-Man: No Way Home (Wikipedia) (wikipedia.org)
- Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Wikipedia) (wikipedia.org)
- Shocked Miles Morales meme (Know Your Meme) (knowyourmeme.com)
- Arachnophobia (Wikipedia) (wikipedia.org)
- Charlotte huntsman spider (Science Alert) (sciencealert.com)
- Australian family huntsman roommate (Twisted Sifter) (twistedsifter.com)
- Anansi (Wikipedia) (wikipedia.org)
- Charlotte's Web (Wikipedia) (wikipedia.org)
- Jorōgumo (Wikipedia) (wikipedia.org)
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