Spider Web Emoji
U+1F578:spider_web:About Spider Web 🕸️
Spider Web () 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 spider's web, the intricate radial silk structure spiders build to catch prey. No spider is visible. That's the whole point: an empty web reads as abandoned, haunted, or decorative.
🕸️ lives in three cultural lanes. Spider-Man is the biggest: Peter Parker's web-slinging is the most recognizable superpower in 21st-century pop culture, and 🕸️ is shorthand for the entire franchise. No Way Home (2021) grossed $1.9B; Across the Spider-Verse (2023) drove 🕷️ and 🕸️ to their highest single-quarter search interest on record.
Halloween. Fake cobwebs draped over porches and railings are one of the top-selling Halloween decorations in the U.S.. 🕸️ spikes reliably every October, paired with 🎃👻💀🕷️ in the spooky-season emoji palette.
Deception and abandonment. Sir Walter Scott's 1808 line from Marmion, 'Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive,' has been a web metaphor for over two centuries. In casual texting, 'my gym membership 🕸️' is the self-deprecating neglect joke that has its own genre.
October drives a huge seasonal spike. 🕸️ is in almost every Halloween decoration post, haunted-house review, and horror-movie thread from late September to early November. The Halloween emoji palette is 🎃👻💀🕷️🕸️🦇, and 🕸️ is the most neglect-capable of the group.
In Marvel fandom, 🕸️ is the year-round franchise stamp. Spider-Man trailers, casting news, and best-Spider-Man debates all pull it in. The emoji spikes hard during theatrical windows: No Way Home (Dec 2021), Across the Spider-Verse (Jun 2023), any Beyond the Spider-Verse release will trigger the next one.
In casual texting, 🕸️ is the 'forgotten object' emoji. 'My Duolingo streak 🕸️', 'my dating app 🕸️', 'our group chat 🕸️' all lean on neglect-as-punchline. It's the bug emoji that does the most emotional work without any animal in the frame.
A spider web. Used for Halloween and spooky content, Spider-Man references, neglect or abandonment jokes ('my inbox 🕸️'), the web-of-lies metaphor from Walter Scott's Marmion (1808), or gothic aesthetics year-round.
The Halloween Emoji Family
The Bug & Insect Family
What it means from...
'My dating app 🕸️' or 'our group chat 🕸️' is the classic neglect joke. 'Come over for Halloween 🕸️🎃' is seasonal. Playful in both cases.
Often domestic. 'The garage has become 🕸️ territory' is 'we need to clean out.' Also: 'our Friday plans 🕸️' meaning 'we said we'd do something, then didn't.'
Self-deprecating productivity humor. 'My inbox 🕸️' / 'that OKR 🕸️.' Use cautiously; can read passive-aggressive if sent about a shared project.
'Haven't heard from you in weeks 🕸️' is a soft nudge. 🕸️🖤 reads as goth-flirty if that's the aesthetic you're both in. Otherwise more melancholic than romantic.
Emoji combos
Bug emoji search interest over time
Origin story
🕸️ was approved as U+1F578 "SPIDER WEB" in Unicode 7.0, released June 16, 2014, alongside its companion 🕷️ spider. Both originated in Microsoft's 1990 Wingdings font, and Unicode integrated them during its 2014 cleanup of long-used but never-standardized symbols.
For the first few years, 🕸️ defaulted to a flat text-style dingbat on many platforms. Unicode 9.0 in 2016 made emoji presentation the default, and platforms rolled out full-color cobweb designs. Apple's is a classic radial web; Google's has a slight asymmetry; Samsung leans into an illustrative cartoon feel.
The metaphors that make 🕸️ emotionally versatile all predate the emoji by centuries. Sir Walter Scott's tangled-web line is from 1808. The 'World Wide Web' was coined by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. Spider-Man, the franchise that gave 🕸️ most of its modern cultural weight, debuted in Amazing Fantasy #15 in August 1962.
Design history
- 1808Sir Walter Scott publishes [*Marmion*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marmion_%28poem%29). The 'tangled web' line becomes a 200-year metaphor for deception.
- 1962Spider-Man debuts in [Amazing Fantasy #15](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Man). Web-slinging becomes one of comics' most iconic powers.
- 1989Tim Berners-Lee coins 'World Wide Web' at CERN. The web metaphor for hyperlinked information sticks permanently.↗
- 1990Microsoft ships the spider-web glyph in the Wingdings font. Used unofficially for two decades before Unicode standardization.
- 2014Approved as U+1F578 SPIDER WEB in Unicode 7.0 (June 16, 2014), with 🕷️.↗
- 2016Unicode 9.0 adds default emoji presentation; platforms roll out full-color cobweb designs.
- 2018[Into the Spider-Verse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Man:_Into_the_Spider-Verse) releases. 🕸️ becomes a fandom stamp alongside 🕷️.
- 2021[Spider-Man: No Way Home](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Man:_No_Way_Home) grosses $1.9B globally. 🕸️ spikes in Q4 2021 and Q1 2022 (our data).
- 2023[Across the Spider-Verse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Man:_Across_the_Spider-Verse) drives 🕷️ to 97 (bug-family all-time high) in Q2 2023; 🕸️ tracks alongside it.
Around the world
United States
🕸️ reads Halloween first, Spider-Man second. American fake-cobweb culture is aggressive: the stretchy polyester material is a $200M/year Halloween-decor category in the U.S., and porches with elaborate web setups became a TikTok competition genre in the 2020s.
United Kingdom
British usage leans more toward the Marmion tangled-web metaphor than Halloween decor, which is a much smaller decoration category in the UK. 🕸️ shows up more in literary and political-commentary contexts ('tangled web of policy 🕸️').
Japan
蜘蛛の巣 (kumo no su) has folklore weight. The Jorōgumo (spider-woman yokai) weaves webs to trap unwary travelers; she's appeared across centuries of Japanese horror. 🕸️ in anime contexts often carries this 'beautiful trap' reading, especially in Demon Slayer's Spider Family arc.
Global goth / alt culture
🕸️🖤 is one of the most-used pairings in goth Instagram and TikTok bios year-round. It's a year-round aesthetic anchor, not just a seasonal one. Paired with ⛓️🕯️🖤, it reads elegant and dark; with 🎃💀🦇 it reads Halloween-specific.
No. That's Walter Scott's 1808 narrative poem *Marmion*. It's one of the most frequently misattributed quotes in English. Scott predates the Bard by about two centuries, and the line is recognizably early-19th-century diction, not Elizabethan.
Often confused with
Spider itself, not the web. Companion emoji, both added in Unicode 7.0 (2014). Together 🕸️🕷️ is the full Halloween set.
Spider itself, not the web. Companion emoji, both added in Unicode 7.0 (2014). Together 🕸️🕷️ is the full Halloween set.
A circle can look web-adjacent at small sizes on old fonts. Modern renderings make 🕸️ clearly radial and off-white.
A circle can look web-adjacent at small sizes on old fonts. Modern renderings make 🕸️ clearly radial and off-white.
🕸️ is the empty web. 🕷️ is the spider itself. Both added in Unicode 7.0 (2014). 🕸️ alone reads abandoned / decorative; 🕷️ alone reads alive. Together, the full Halloween set.
Caption ideas
Fun facts
- •Spider silk is stronger per weight than steel and tougher than Kevlar. Scientists have spent decades trying to synthesize it at scale.
- •The 'tangled web' quote from *Marmion* (1808) is one of the most-misattributed lines in English. Most people think Shakespeare wrote it. He didn't.
- •Tim Berners-Lee coined 'World Wide Web' in 1989 at CERN. The 'web' in WWW is the same metaphor as 🕸️: many nodes connected by strands.
- •Fake cobwebs are one of the top-selling Halloween decorations in the U.S. The stretchy polyester material is specifically manufactured for porches and has its own Halloween-industry category.
- •Charlotte from *Charlotte's Web* wove the word 'SOME PIG' into her web to save Wilbur. It's one of the most-remembered image-text pairings in American children's lit.
- •Orb-weaver spiders (the ones that make the classic radial 🕸️ shape) rebuild their webs every night. That's up to 365 webs per spider, per year, for their 1-2 year lifespan.
- •Spider-Man's web-shooters are mechanical in the comics, not biological; Peter Parker is a chemist who invented the web fluid. The 2002 Raimi film switched to organic biology to simplify the story.
In pop culture
- •Spider-Man (Stan Lee & Steve Ditko, 1962). Three live-action franchises and the Spider-Verse animated films have kept 🕸️ at the center of Marvel marketing.
- •Charlotte's Web (E.B. White, 1952). Charlotte writes messages in her web to save Wilbur. One of the most taught children's books in English.
- •Marmion (Walter Scott, 1808). 'Oh, what a tangled web we weave.' The quote is commonly misattributed to Shakespeare, which is itself a meme.
- •World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee, 1989). The most influential 20th-century coinage to use 'web' as metaphor.
- •Arachnophobia (1990 film) uses webs as its central horror visual throughout.
- •Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and other Ghibli films feature elaborate spider webs as dreamlike texture.
- •Jorōgumo folklore, re-popularized in Demon Slayer. The shape-shifting spider-woman's web is a standard Japanese horror symbol.
Trivia
For developers
- •🕸️ is + variation selector for emoji presentation on most platforms.
- •Without , older platforms may render as a flat text dingbat. Include it when outputting from code.
- •Common shortcodes: , (Slack, Discord, GitHub).
- •HTML entity: or . URL-encoded: .
Approved in Unicode 7.0, released June 16, 2014, as U+1F578 SPIDER WEB. Alongside its companion 🕷️. Requires the FE0F variation selector for proper emoji rendering on some older platforms.
By weight, yes. Spider silk has higher tensile strength per gram than steel and is tougher than Kevlar. Research labs have spent decades trying to synthesize it at industrial scale; nobody has fully cracked it.
See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.
What does 🕸️ mean to you most?
Select all that apply
- Spider Web Emoji (Emojipedia) (emojipedia.org)
- Spider-Man (Wikipedia) (wikipedia.org)
- Marmion poem (Wikipedia) (wikipedia.org)
- Spider silk (Wikipedia) (wikipedia.org)
- World Wide Web (Wikipedia) (wikipedia.org)
- Charlotte's Web (Wikipedia) (wikipedia.org)
- Spider-Man: No Way Home (Wikipedia) (wikipedia.org)
- Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Wikipedia) (wikipedia.org)
- Orb-weaver spider (Wikipedia) (wikipedia.org)
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