Timer Clock Emoji
U+23F2:timer_clock:About Timer Clock ⏲️
Timer Clock () is part of the Travel & Places group in Unicode. Added in Unicode E0.6. Type on GitHub and Slack to use it. On Discord it's . Click copy above to grab it, paste it anywhere.
Works in iMessage, WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, Instagram, Twitter, Gmail, and every app that supports Unicode.
Scroll down for the full story: meaning, trends, combos, and more.
How it looks
What does it mean?
A kitchen timer with a rotating dial. ⏲️ is the countdown emoji, it represents cooking timers, baking, time-limited tests, and any scenario where a set duration ends with a beep. Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010), colored in Emoji 1.0 (2015).
Most platforms render ⏲️ as a stylized egg timer with a ringed dial and a small bell or knob on top. Apple, WhatsApp, and Facebook's designs look the most kitchen-like. Google and Samsung lean digital.
The critical distinction from its sibling ⏱️ (stopwatch): a timer counts down from a set time (25:00 → 0:00, then beeps). A stopwatch counts up from zero (0:00 → however long you let it run). If you're boiling eggs, that's ⏲️. If you're racing a friend across the parking lot, that's ⏱️.
In texting, ⏲️ is rare. It shows up mostly in cooking content, exam references, and occasionally as a more "kitchen-adjacent" version of ⏰.
⏲️ is the quiet one of the time-emoji family. Google Trends shows it has about 1/8th the search volume of ⏰ and less than half of ⏱️. It's technically correct for many use cases, but people default to ⏰.
Where it does show up:
Recipe and cooking content. "Bake 45 min ⏲️" in a TikTok recipe. Baking influencers, meal-prep Instagrams, and cooking bloggers treat ⏲️ as the "kitchen emoji" even though there are better kitchen emojis.
Exam and test posts. "90 minutes ⏲️" for SAT, GRE, bar exam, and coding interview content. Countdown tests feel more ⏲️ than ⏰ because the duration is fixed and the stakes are clear.
Microwave and quick tasks. "Microwave 3 min ⏲️" or "2-minute plank ⏲️." Short, bounded, timed.
Pomodoro variants. Some productivity accounts use ⏲️ instead of ⏱️ because they think of focus blocks as countdowns ("25 minutes remaining") rather than up-counts ("25 minutes completed"). Both are technically valid; most people use ⏱️ anyway.
A kitchen timer. It represents countdown timing, cooking, baking, tests, and any scenario where a set duration ends with a beep. Counts down from a set time to zero, unlike ⏱️ (stopwatch) which counts up.
The time & timekeeping emoji family
Clocks & watches
Hourglasses
Emoji combos
Origin story
The mechanical kitchen timer, the kind ⏲️ depicts, was invented in the early 20th century as a household adaptation of industrial timing mechanisms. The most iconic example is the tomato-shaped Lux Minute Minder, a wind-up kitchen timer manufactured by Lux Clock Company starting in 1930s. That's the exact design Francesco Cirillo used as a university student when he invented the Pomodoro Technique in the late 1980s. The Italian word for tomato is pomodoro, and that's where the technique got its name.
As an emoji, ⏲️ was part of Unicode 6.0 (October 2010) alongside ⏰ and ⏱️. It's one of the emojis that requires the variation selector on most platforms to render in color, without it, many systems show a plain text glyph.
The emoji's design drifted. Apple shows a kitchen-style dial timer with a bell on top. Samsung shows a digital display. Google's version has evolved multiple times across Material Design updates. There's less visual consensus on ⏲️ than on almost any other time emoji.
Design history
- 1930Lux Clock Company introduces the Minute Minder wind-up kitchen timer.
- 1980Francesco Cirillo invents the Pomodoro Technique using a tomato-shaped kitchen timer.
- 2010⏲️ approved in Unicode 6.0 (October).
- 2015Emoji 1.0 gives ⏲️ colorful designs, but with more platform variation than siblings.
⏲️ is the slowest-growing of the time emojis
Often confused with
⏱️ is a stopwatch (counts up from zero). ⏲️ is a timer (counts down to zero). Stopwatch for how long something takes. Timer for "beep me in 25 minutes." Different codepoints, different purposes.
⏱️ is a stopwatch (counts up from zero). ⏲️ is a timer (counts down to zero). Stopwatch for how long something takes. Timer for "beep me in 25 minutes." Different codepoints, different purposes.
⏰ is an alarm clock (fires at a specific wall-clock time, like 7 AM). ⏲️ is a timer (fires after a duration, like 25 minutes from now). Alarm clock: "wake me at 7." Timer: "beep me in 25."
⏰ is an alarm clock (fires at a specific wall-clock time, like 7 AM). ⏲️ is a timer (fires after a duration, like 25 minutes from now). Alarm clock: "wake me at 7." Timer: "beep me in 25."
🕰️ is an ornate mantelpiece clock (aesthetic, decorative, no countdown function). ⏲️ is a functional kitchen timer. 🕰️ doesn't count anything. ⏲️ is all about counting down.
🕰️ is an ornate mantelpiece clock (aesthetic, decorative, no countdown function). ⏲️ is a functional kitchen timer. 🕰️ doesn't count anything. ⏲️ is all about counting down.
⏲️ (timer) counts down from a duration to zero. ⏱️ (stopwatch) counts up from zero. Use ⏲️ for cooking and tests. Use ⏱️ for racing and Pomodoro. Both are from Unicode 6.0 but they serve opposite directions.
⏲️ is a countdown timer ("beep me in 25 minutes"). ⏰ is an alarm clock ("wake me at 7 AM"). Timer counts a duration. Alarm clock fires at a specific time.
Timer vs Stopwatch: which one do I use?
| Feature | ⏲️ Timer | ⏱️ Stopwatch | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Direction | Counts **down** to 0 | Counts **up** from 0 | |
| Starts at | A duration you set (25:00) | 0:00 | |
| Alert | Beeps when it hits 0 | No alert, you stop it manually | |
| Use case | Wake me in 25 minutes | How long did this take? | |
| Classic example | Kitchen timer, Pomodoro, tests | Race timing, mile splits | |
| Codepoint | U+23F2 | U+23F1 |
Caption ideas
Aesthetic sets
Fun facts
- •Kitchen timers with tomato shapes became iconic because of the 1930s Lux Minute Minder, a ubiquitous wind-up kitchen timer.
- •The Pomodoro Technique is technically named after a physical kitchen timer shaped like a tomato, making ⏲️🍅 the most historically accurate Pomodoro emoji combo.
- •⏲️ requires the variation selector to render as colorful emoji on most platforms. Without it, it shows as a plain text glyph.
- •Google Trends data shows ⏲️ searches growing slowly (~5x) from 2020 to 2026, far behind ⏰'s ~8x and ⏱️'s ~30x growth.
- •The green tea brewing standard is 2 minutes ⏲️, black tea is 3-5 minutes, herbal is 5-7. Cooking and brewing content is where ⏲️ does most of its work.
Trivia
For developers
- •⏲️ is a two-character sequence: + (variation selector-16). Without the selector, it falls back to a plain text glyph on most platforms.
- •Shortcodes: on Slack, Discord, GitHub.
- •Part of Unicode 6.0 (October 2010). Platform-specific designs vary more than most emojis, Apple and Samsung render it very differently.
- •In countdown UIs, ⏲️ is the expected icon for "time remaining." ⏱️ signals "time elapsed." Don't mix them up.
Unicode 6.0, October 2010. Made colorful in Emoji 1.0 (2015). Requires the U+FE0F variation selector on most platforms to render as an emoji.
See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.
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