Teapot Emoji

A teapot. Rendered as a ceramic pot with a bulbous body, a curved spout, a lid with a knob, and a handle. Colors are weirdly inconsistent across platforms: Apple ships a white pot, Google a brown one, Samsung brown, Microsoft teal, and Twitter's old Twemoji design was blue. There is no canonical color, which is unusual for a household object.

There are three meanings competing for 🫖. In group chats it usually means gossip, because "tea" in English slang now means gossip. In British and Asian contexts it is literal: actual tea, the actual ritual. In tech Twitter and Slack it is a programmer joke about HTTP status code 418, a Python reference, or a nod to the Utah teapot that computer graphics has been rendering since 1975.

Approved in Unicode 13.0 in March 2020 as U+1FAD6U+1FAD6. The original proposal, L2/19-103, was written by Jennifer Daniel, Google's emoji lead and chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee. She noted that a teapot was conspicuously missing even though tea is the second-most consumed beverage on Earth after water, and the existing ☕ was already pulling double duty as both coffee and tea.

It is, in other words, a very late arrival for a very old object.

🫖 runs three parallel tracks and the context tells you which one is active.

Gossip mode. "Spill it 🫖", "I have tea 🫖", "not me watching this unfold 🫖". Dominant on TikTok and X, especially in drama threads, reality-TV live tweeting, and celebrity discourse. Gen Z uses it almost exclusively this way and will read a literal "fancy a cuppa 🫖" as oddly formal.

Literal tea mode. British group chats, South Asian family threads, East Asian tea culture accounts. "Afternoon tea 🫖", "matcha morning 🫖", "first proper brew since I got home 🫖". Gen X leans hard into this reading while Gen Z rarely uses it non-ironically unless they are actually at an afternoon tea.

Nerd mode. Tech Twitter uses 🫖 to reference HTTP 418 "I'm a teapot", the April Fools' status code from RFC 2324 (1998). Graphics and 3D communities post 🫖 when the Utah teapot shows up as a hidden Easter egg in a film or game. This usage is small but extremely confident about itself.

🫖 and ☕ both carry the gossip meaning, but they feel different. ☕ is older, warmer, and has Kermit baggage. 🫖 is more deliberate: you are not sipping, you are pouring. "Spill the tea 🫖" is an active verb; "🐸☕" is a smug observation.

Tea itself predates the emoji by about 4,700 years. Chinese legend credits emperor Shennong with discovering tea around 2737 BCE when leaves blew into his pot of boiling water. The teapot as an object comes much later. Yixing teapots from Jiangsu, China were refined during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) and are the ancestor of nearly every small ceramic teapot shape you have ever seen. Japan's side-handled kyusu traces back to the same Chinese originals, brought over by the monk Ingen Ryuki in the 17th century.

The emoji took much longer. 🫖 was proposed in L2/19-103 by Jennifer Daniel in September 2019 and approved for Unicode 13.0 in March 2020. The pitch was simple: tea drinkers outnumber coffee drinkers globally, "spill the tea" was already everywhere, and the existing hot beverage emoji ☕ was being stretched to cover both. Approval landed right as the pandemic was starting, which is part of why 🫖 rollout felt slow. iOS 14.2 shipped it in November 2020; Android 11 had it earlier. By 2022 it was on every major platform.

1. 2019Jennifer Daniel submits L2/19-103 proposal on behalf of Google↗
2. 2020Unicode 13.0 approves 🫖 on March 10, codepoint U+1FAD6↗
3. 2020Google ships 🫖 on Android 11 in September, first major platform↗
4. 2020Apple ships 🫖 on iOS 14.2 in November with a white pot design↗
5. 2021Samsung, WhatsApp, Twitter, Microsoft, Facebook all roll out designs through the year
6. 2023Apple redesigns 🫖 on iOS 17.4 with softer highlights, keeping white color↗

The gossip meaning is dominant in English-speaking internet culture and almost absent elsewhere. A Japanese user seeing 🫖 will read matcha, sencha, or chanoyu (the tea ceremony), not drama. A Chinese user will read gong fu cha or the Yixing tradition.

In the UK, 🫖 is closer to its literal meaning than anywhere else in the anglosphere. British texting data shows older users overwhelmingly intend "cup of tea" and younger users split roughly half-and-half between literal and slang. "Putting the kettle on 🫖" is almost ceremonial in British group chats.

South Asian households often use 🫖 for chai, though 🧉 and ☕ compete for that job too. Turkish 🇹🇷 users are the heaviest per-capita tea drinkers on the planet at ~1,300 cups per person per year but tend to use ☕ because the Turkish çay glass does not look like the emoji.

• •Tea is the second-most consumed beverage on the planet after water, ahead of coffee, beer, and every soda combined. Despite this, 🫖 only arrived in 2020 while ☕ shipped in 2003.
• •Turks drink the most tea per capita by a huge margin: roughly 1,300 cups per person per year, about 3–4 cups every day, every person, on average.
• •The Utah teapot has been a standard 3D model in computer graphics since Martin Newell created it in 1975 at the University of Utah. His wife Sandra suggested using their actual white Melitta teapot as the reference. The original pot now lives at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
• •The Utah teapot makes cameo appearances in *Toy Story*, The Simpsons couch gags, and dozens of Pixar films as an in-joke. The Vulkan and OpenGL graphics APIs put it on their logos next to the Stanford bunny and Stanford dragon.
• •HTTP status code 418 "I'm a teapot" is real. Originally from RFC 2324 (1998), a satire of HTTP extensions, it's still returned by production servers as an Easter egg. When the IETF tried to kill it in 2017, the Save 418 movement talked them out of it.
• •"I'm a Little Teapot" was written in 1939 by George Harry Sanders and Clarence Z. Kelley as a dance song for kids who couldn't keep up with the Waltz Clog. The pouring gesture at the end, arm like a spout, is still taught in British and American nurseries today.
• •Tea arrived in Japan from Tang-dynasty China around 805 CE via Buddhist monks. The formalized tea ceremony (chanoyu) was codified by Sen no Rikyū in the 16th century and still shapes how Japanese kyusu teapots are designed.
• •The Yixing clay teapots from Jiangsu, China, are porous and take on the flavor of whatever tea you brew in them. Collectors dedicate individual pots to single tea varieties because the seasoning is so strong. Top-grade Yixing pots regularly sell at auction for six figures.
• •Jennifer Daniel, who submitted the 🫖 proposal, also chairs the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee and ran Google's emoji design team when Android dropped its blob-shaped emoji for the current round design in 2017. Almost every emoji you have sent in the last five years passed through her committee.