Winking Face With Tongue Emoji

A yellow face sticking out its tongue while winking one eye. The wink is what makes this emoji dangerous. 😛 sticks its tongue out with both eyes open (innocent playfulness). 😜 closes one eye (it knows exactly what it's doing).

The combination of wink + tongue is a cocktail of plausible deniability. The tongue says "I'm joking." The wink says "unless..." This makes 😜 the perfect emoji for messages that live in the gap between teasing and flirting, sarcasm and sincerity. "You looked good today 😜" isn't the same as "You looked good today 😊" and everyone knows it.

😜 is the clear leader of the tongue-out family. Google Trends shows 😜 surging to 87 in Q1 2023 while 😛 (4-5) and 😝 (5-6) stayed flat. That spike was 6x its 2021 baseline, the kind of explosive growth that happens when an emoji catches a cultural wave. The wink makes 😜 more interesting, more ambiguous, and more searchable. Ambiguity drives curiosity. Curiosity drives Google searches.

😜 was part of Unicode 6.0 (2010) under the exquisitely verbose name "Face with Stuck-Out Tongue and Winking Eye." It's the emoji form of ;P, the winking tongue emoticon that's been around since the 1990s.

😜 is the Swiss Army knife of playful communication. It works for:

Flirting with plausible deniability. "Come over 😜" could be a serious invitation or a joke. The wink + tongue gives the sender an exit if the recipient doesn't reciprocate. This is 😜's superpower: it lets you say bold things while maintaining a retreat path.

Softening sarcasm. "Great parking job 😜" lands differently than "Great parking job" or "Great parking job 😐." The wink-tongue combo signals that the criticism is playful, not hostile.

Signaling confidence. Unlike 🤪 (which reads as chaotic and out of control), 😜 reads as composed mischief. The winking eye shows self-awareness. You know you're being cheeky. That's part of the appeal.

SweetyHigh observes that 😜 sits at the intersection of humor and flirtation. In dating contexts, it's one of the most common early-stage emojis because it tests boundaries without crossing them. Compliment + 😜 = safe flirting. If the response is positive, escalate. If not, the wink-tongue provided cover: "I was just kidding."

There's a gender dimension too. When guys send 😜, recipients are more likely to read it as suggestive. When girls send it, it's more often read as playful. The same emoji, filtered through different assumptions about intent.

Both, and that's the point. 😜 is designed to live in the gap between flirty and friendly. The wink leans flirty. The tongue leans playful. Together, they create plausible deniability. Whether 😜 is flirting or joking depends entirely on context: what was said before it, who sent it, and what the relationship is. That ambiguity isn't a bug. It's the feature.

• •Compliment + 😜 = likely flirting
• •Tease + 😜 = likely joking
• •Late night 😜 = likely suggestive
• •Group chat 😜 = likely just playful
• •From someone who rarely uses emoji = likely intentional

The winking tongue has a longer digital history than most emoji.

The text emoticon ;P (semicolon = winking eye, P = tongue sticking out) was already common on IRC, Usenet, and bulletin boards by the early 1990s. Urban Dictionary's entry for ;p defines it as "winking and sticking tongue out," adding that it denotes "sly humor." That's exactly right: the wink is what turns a simple tongue-out (:P) from innocent playfulness into something with intent.

When Unicode standardized emoji in 2010, 😜 arrived with the cumbersome name "Face with Stuck-Out Tongue and Winking Eye" (10 words). The CLDR later trimmed it to "Winking Face with Tongue" (4 words). Both names describe the same thing: a face that's being playful and knows it.

The design has been remarkably consistent across platforms. Apple, Google, Samsung, and Microsoft all render 😜 with the right eye closed and the left eye wide open. The tongue sticks out to the left. This visual consistency is unusual (many emoji look wildly different across platforms), and it means 😜 carries the same meaning whether you're on an iPhone or an Android. No grimace confusion here.

The massive Google Trends spike (from ~13 to 87 between Q1 2022 and Q1 2023) suggests 😜 caught a cultural wave, likely driven by TikTok meme formats and dating app usage where the wink-tongue combo serves as shorthand for playful flirtation.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F61CU+1F61C FACE WITH STUCK-OUT TONGUE AND WINKING EYE. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. Renamed via CLDR to "Winking Face with Tongue." Arrived alongside 😝 (squinting tongue) in the same Unicode version. The plain 😛 wasn't added until Unicode 6.1 (2012). Like many emoji families, the more expressive variants were standardized before the plain one.

Winking carries different weight in different cultures. In Western countries, a wink is playful, conspiratorial, or flirty. In parts of West Africa and Asia, winking at someone can be considered rude or inappropriate. Adding a tongue to the wink amplifies whatever the wink means: playful becomes very playful, inappropriate becomes very inappropriate.

😜's flirty reading is strongest in Western dating culture, where it's one of the most common early-stage emojis on dating apps. In more conservative digital communication cultures, the combination of a wink (suggesting hidden intent) and a tongue (carrying suggestive undertones) can feel overly forward, especially from a stranger or casual acquaintance.

• •😜 surged from 13 to 87 on Google Trends between Q1 2022 and Q1 2023, while 😛 and 😝 stayed flat at 4-6. The wink made all the difference.
• •😜's original Unicode name was "Face with Stuck-Out Tongue and Winking Eye" (10 words). The CLDR trimmed it to "Winking Face with Tongue" (4 words). Both describe a face that knows it's being cheeky.
• •The text emoticon ;P (semicolon = winking eye, P = tongue) has been in use since the early 1990s on IRC and Usenet. 😜 is its graphical descendant, arriving 20 years later in Unicode 6.0 (2010).
• •😜 is remarkably consistent across platforms. Apple, Google, Samsung, and Microsoft all render it with the right eye closed and left eye open, tongue sticking left. This cross-platform consistency is unusual and means the emoji's meaning doesn't change with your phone. Verify this yourself on LetsEmoji.
• •In dating app culture, 😜 is one of the most common early-stage flirting emojis because it tests boundaries without crossing them. The wink suggests intent, the tongue provides an escape route.
• •Fresh April 2026 Google Trends pull confirms the 2022-2023 explosion was not noise. From 13 in Q1 2022 to a peak of 86 in Q1 2023, 😜 jumped 6.6x in exactly 12 months. The spike overlaps with Instagram Notes launching December 2022, where the winking-tongue became a common cryptic one-line status, and with a wave of TikTok captions using 😜 as shorthand for ironic flirtation.
• •Despite being the most-used tongue emoji in the 2015 Kralj Novak et al. sentiment study (1,035 tweets, more than 😋, 😛, and 😝 combined), 😜 scored only 56.6% positive. It sits alone in the 'popular but sarcastic' quadrant. That's the wink tax: more ambiguous usage contexts, more sarcastic reads, lower positivity average.
• •😜 didn't just have its own breakout, it staged a coup. 😏 was the reigning flirt emoji from 2019 through Q2 2022 (peaking at 41 on Google Trends worldwide). Then Q3 2022 hit and 😜 leapt to 46 while 😏 dropped to 35, a changing of the guard that has held ever since. The 'knowing wink with escape hatch' replaced the 'unambiguous smirk' as the default flirt signal.
• •Your brain processes 😉 and 😜 the same way it processes verbal irony. Weissman and Tanner's 2018 EEG study recorded a strong P600 brainwave, the same signal the brain fires when a sentence needs to be reanalyzed as sarcastic, whenever participants read a wink at the end of an otherwise literal statement. The little pause you feel before decoding 'nice job 😜' is a measurable waveform in your posterior cortex.
• •Roughly a third of adults physically cannot wink one eye independently. It's about orbicularis oculi motoneuron excitability and doesn't correlate with handedness or eye dominance. For everyone who can't wink in real life, 😜 is a prosthetic wink. The emoji is a social gesture your face may literally be unable to produce.
• •A winking emoji helped anchor a $90,000 workplace harassment verdict. In Herman v. Ohio University, a supervisor's texts with compliments, 'sweet dreams' messages, and a 😉 after she asked him to stop were ruled severe enough to create a hostile work environment. The courts' message: a single wink is fine. A wink deployed after 'stop' is evidence.

• •The biggest risk with 😜 is the flirty/friendly ambiguity being read wrong. A friend who sends 😜 after a tease might have it read as flirtation by the recipient. A person flirting with 😜 might have it read as "just joking" by someone who doesn't pick up the signal. The ambiguity is a feature for the sender but can be frustrating for the receiver.
• •At work, 😜 is risky. The wink carries flirty connotations that don't belong in professional communication. Even in a lighthearted Slack channel, 😜 from a manager to a direct report can create uncomfortable dynamics. Stick to 😄 or 😂 at work.
• •Some people don't distinguish between 😛 (plain tongue), 😜 (winking tongue), and 😝 (squinting tongue). At small sizes on phone screens, the eye differences can disappear. If you're sending 😜 specifically for the wink, the recipient might just see "a face with its tongue out."

• •😜 is U+1F61CU+1F61C. Unicode name: FACE WITH STUCK-OUT TONGUE AND WINKING EYE. CLDR: "winking face with tongue." Common shortcodes: :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye::stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: (Slack, Discord) or :wink_tongue::wink_tongue: (some platforms). Part of Unicode 6.0 (2010).
• •For sentiment analysis: 😜 is positive but with a flirty/sarcastic modifier. It often appears after statements that shouldn't be taken at face value. If your NLP pipeline treats all smiley faces as equally positive, 😜 will produce misleading results. It signals playfulness, not sincerity.

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