Weary Cat Emoji

A cat face with wide eyes, an open mouth, and paws pressed against its cheeks in a pose that directly mirrors 😱 Face Screaming in Fear. The expression is unmistakably based on Edvard Munch's *The Scream* (1893) — filtered through a cartoon cat. On most platforms, the cat's mouth is wide open and its eyes are round with shock.

Here's the catch: despite looking like a screaming cat, the official Unicode name is "Weary Cat." Emojipedia notes that the design "more closely resembles" 😱 than 😩 (Weary Face, the human version it's supposedly based on). This name-vs-appearance mismatch means most people use 🙀 for shock and surprise rather than tiredness. The cat looks like it just heard something unbelievable, not like it needs a nap.

🙀 belongs to a set of nine cat face emojis (😺 😸 😹 😻 😼 😽 🙀 😿 😾) that exist because of one Japanese phone company. In 2003, au by KDDI added animated cat faces to their proprietary emoji set, and when Unicode standardized emoji in 2010, they were preserved for compatibility. That's why cats get nine facial expressions and dogs get zero. It's not favoritism — it's legacy infrastructure.

In texting, 🙀 functions as a quirkier, more playful version of 😱. Where 😱 is dramatic human shock, 🙀 is dramatic cat shock — which inherently carries a lighter, more humorous tone. The cat face signals "I'm being theatrical about this" in a way that the human version doesn't. Sending "they said WHAT 🙀" reads differently than "they said WHAT 😱" because the cat version adds a layer of absurdist comedy.

Cat people (and the internet is disproportionately cat people) reach for 🙀 specifically because it's a cat. The emoji signals membership in a community that treats cats as the superior animal and communicates through feline proxies. It's the same impulse behind cat memes, cat reaction GIFs, and the shocked cat compilations that dominate TikTok and YouTube.

On social media, 🙀 appears less frequently than 😱 but shows up in niche communities: cat owner groups, anime fans, people who prefer the aesthetic of cat-face emojis over human ones. It's also common in spaces where people deliberately use the less popular emoji as a form of personality signaling — choosing 🙀 over 😱 says something about you.

🙀 is more cute than flirty. Using cat emojis in dating signals playfulness and approachability. It's the kind of emoji someone uses when they're comfortable enough to be a little goofy. Not overtly romantic, but the willingness to be silly is attractive to the right person.

• •Choosing 🙀 over 😱 → they're being deliberately cute and playful
• •Using multiple cat emojis in conversation → they're establishing a shared language with you
• •🙀 after you share news → they're engaged and excited, with an extra layer of personality

The reason cats have nine face emojis and dogs have zero is one of the more entertaining facts in emoji history. In 2003, the Japanese phone carrier au by KDDI added a set of animated cat face emojis to their proprietary character set. The cats were animated — their expressions changed — and they quickly became popular among Japanese users.

When the Unicode Consortium standardized emoji for global use in 2010, they had to maintain backward compatibility with existing Japanese emoji sets from SoftBank, Docomo, and KDDI. The cat faces were in active use across millions of Japanese phones, so they were absorbed into the standard. That's it. That's why cats get a complete emotional range (happy, loving, laughing, smirking, kissing, shocked, crying, angry) and no other animal does.

Japan's broader cat culture provides context. The country has a centuries-long relationship with cats: Maneki-neko (beckoning cat) figurines have been shop icons since the Edo period, Tama the cat) was a station master at Kishi Station, and Tokyo's cat cafes became a global phenomenon. In this cultural context, giving cats their own emoji faces wasn't unusual — it was expected.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (October 2010) as U+1F640U+1F640 WEARY CAT FACE. Added to Emoji 1.0 in June 2015. Part of the Emoticons block (U+1F600U+1F600–U+1F64FU+1F64F).

The cat face emoji set (😺–😾, 🙀) was standardized in Unicode 6.0 for compatibility with the Japanese carrier au by KDDI, which added animated cat faces to their emoji set in 2003. Japan's cat culture — from Maneki-neko (beckoning cat) figurines to cat cafes — made feline emoji a natural fit for Japanese mobile communication. When Unicode absorbed these designs, they became permanent residents of the global emoji standard.

The cultural context for 🙀 is inseparable from Japan's relationship with cats. Maneki-neko (beckoning cat) figurines have been icons since the Edo period. Japan has cat islands, cat temples, and entire cat cafes as a business model. When KDDI added animated cat faces to their emoji set in 2003, it reflected a culture where cats are embedded in daily life and communication.

In Western internet culture, cats achieved similar status through a different path: memes. LOLcats, Grumpy Cat, keyboard cat, and the broader tradition of cat reaction images made feline expressions a native internet language. 🙀 benefits from this: even users who don't know about the Japanese KDDI origin instinctively reach for cat emojis because the internet trained them to express emotion through cats.

In cultures without strong cat-as-communication traditions, the cat face emojis see less use. The human faces cover the same emotional ground without the animal layer.

• •Cats have 9 face emojis (😺 😸 😹 😻 😼 😽 🙀 😿 😾) because one Japanese phone company (au by KDDI) added animated cat faces in 2003. When Unicode standardized emoji, they preserved these for compatibility. No other animal has its own emotional spectrum in emoji.
• •Despite being officially named "Weary Cat," the emoji looks like a cat version of Edvard Munch's *The Scream* (1893). The paws-on-cheeks, open-mouth pose directly mirrors 😱. Virtually no one uses 🙀 to express tiredness.
• •Tama the cat), a calico who served as station master at Kishi Station in Wakayama Prefecture from 2007 until her death in 2015, became a cultural icon who boosted the local economy by an estimated $10 million annually. She's the kind of cat celebrity that made cat emoji feel natural in Japan.
• •The Maneki-neko (beckoning cat) figurine, which dates to the Edo period (1603–1868), is one of Japan's most recognizable icons. The raised paw beckoning gesture is believed to bring good luck, and the figure appears in shops and restaurants across East Asia.
• •Internet cat culture and emoji cat culture evolved on parallel tracks. LOLcats (circa 2007), Grumpy Cat (2012), and keyboard cat (2007) established cats as the internet's default emotional proxy. The KDDI cat emojis from 2003 were ahead of the curve by four years.

• •Some people may read 🙀 as tiredness based on the name "Weary Cat," but the overwhelming visual impression is shock. If you mean "I'm exhausted," use 😩 or 😫 instead.
• •Not everyone uses or recognizes cat face emojis. In conversations with people who aren't cat people, 🙀 may read as confusing or juvenile. Know your audience.
• •The cat face adds playfulness, which can undercut serious reactions. If the news is genuinely bad, 😱 carries more weight than 🙀.

• •The LOLcats phenomenon (circa 2007), Grumpy Cat (2012), and Keyboard Cat (2007) established cats as the internet's default emotional proxy. 🙀 inherits this tradition — it's shock expressed through a cat because the internet trained us to feel through felines.
• •Tama the cat) served as station master at Kishi Station in Japan's Wakayama Prefecture, bringing an estimated $10 million annually in tourism. She represents the deep cultural integration of cats in Japanese life that led to KDDI adding cat face emojis in 2003.
• •The Maneki-neko (beckoning cat) figurine, ubiquitous in East Asian shops and restaurants, dates to Japan's Edo period. The cultural significance of cats in Japan directly influenced the decision to create an entire set of cat face emojis.

• •Codepoint: U+1F640U+1F640. Part of the Emoticons block (U+1F600U+1F600–U+1F64FU+1F64F).
• •Shortcodes: :scream_cat::scream_cat: on Slack and GitHub (note: it uses 'scream,' not 'weary').
• •Does not support skin tone modifiers.
• •The Slack shortcode :scream_cat::scream_cat: is revealing — even Slack's engineers recognized that this emoji reads as screaming, not weary. The name-vs-usage disconnect is widely acknowledged.
• •In sentiment analysis, treat 🙀 similarly to 😱 (shock/surprise) rather than 😩 (weariness). The visual dominates the name.

See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.