Wood Emoji

A cut log with visible grain and bark on the ends. 🪵 covers the full span from firewood to framing lumber, from axe-chopped rounds to the finished raw material in a woodworking shop. Emojipedia catalogues it as wood or timber, and its Unicode proposal L2/19-097 called wood "the fibrous part of trees which is used as a material to construct things like buildings, tools and furniture and is burned in fires for heat and for communal gatherings."

Before 2020, there was no way to show wood as a material. 🌲 and 🌳 were the living trees. 🪓 was the tool. But the thing in between, the log, the plank, the board, had no emoji of its own. The proposal called the omission conspicuous and pointed out that "the missing wood emoji has been mentioned online often." It shipped with Unicode 13.0 on March 10, 2020, a week before most of the world locked down. Timing couldn't have been better.

The emoji also carries the "knock on wood" superstition into texting. "Interview went well, knock on 🪵" is the digital equivalent of tapping the table after saying something optimistic. It's small, but it's the only emoji that makes that particular gesture translatable.

🪵 lives in three communities, and they barely overlap.

Woodworking and DIY. This is where 🪵 gets the heaviest rotation. The #woodworking hashtag on TikTok has 226.8 million posts, and #woodworkingprojects adds another 46.3 million. Creators like John Malecki, a former NFL lineman who now builds furniture on camera, caption nearly every post with 🪵. Instagram woodworkers use it in bios, shop tours, and timelapse edits. The emoji shows up in pricing DMs, commission announcements, and the classic "what wood is this" reply thread.

Cottagecore and cabin aesthetic. On Pinterest and Instagram, 🪵 belongs to the cozy-rustic visual set alongside 🍂, 🕯️, 🧣, and 🍄. Cottagecore stayed a dominant aesthetic through 2024 and 2025 before Pinterest started predicting a shift toward "castlecore", but the log still sells the mood: campfire, cabin, slow morning, flannel.

The two-letter-slang crowd. "Morning wood" and the broader joke about erections are real texting uses of 🪵. It's the emoji version of a knowing smirk, almost always in a reply, almost always with ⬆️ or 🌅. Worth knowing exists. Worth reading context before you send.

One more small use: 🪵 as "this plan is solid." Someone throws out an idea, you reply 🪵. It's niche, but it's growing, especially in group chats where 💯 has been worn out.

The "knock on wood" superstition has three serious origin theories, and linguists still argue over which is right.

The tree-spirit theory. Pre-Christian Celtic and Germanic peoples believed trees housed spirits. Touching wood summoned their protection, or thanked them after good fortune. This is the romantic version, the one every listicle leads with. It's also the one folklorist Steve Roud calls "complete nonsense," because there's no documentary chain connecting ancient rituals to modern practice.

The Christian-cross theory. Some historians link the gesture to touching wooden crucifixes, invoking Christ's protection. Plausible on the surface, but if it were Christian in origin, medieval sermons and writings should mention it. They don't. Silence in the historical record is suggestive.

The playground-game theory. Steve Roud's argument. In 19th-century Britain, children played a tag variant called "Tiggy Touchwood" where touching a tree or wooden object made you immune from being caught. The first recorded use of "touch wood" as a superstition appears in 1805, right around when the game was spreading. Adults, the theory goes, carried the gesture out of the schoolyard and into everyday life without remembering why.

The emoji doesn't resolve the argument. It just lets you perform the ritual without needing a table.

1. 2019Proposal L2/19-097 "Wood" submitted to the Unicode Technical Committee
2. 2020Approved in Unicode 13.0 on March 10, released to phones through 2020 OS updates
3. 2020Arrives during COVID lockdowns, coinciding with the home-DIY and cottagecore surges
4. 2021Adopted by woodworking TikTok as the default caption emoji as the niche explodes
5. 2024#woodworking on TikTok crosses 200M posts, making 🪵 one of the most-used logs on the internet

• •The Unicode proposal for 🪵 opened with a one-line case: wood is an important material completely unrepresented in emojis to date. It was accepted on that strength.
• •The first recorded use of "touch wood" as a superstition is from 1805, much later than the pagan or Christian theories suggest. Folklorist Steve Roud thinks it actually comes from a 19th-century children's game called Tiggy Touchwood.
• •In Italy, the superstition uses iron, not wood. "Tocca ferro" is what Italians say after anything death-adjacent, because metal was historically considered slightly magical.
• •TikTok's #woodworking hashtag has 226.8 million posts. For comparison, that's more than the entire population of Brazil.
• •🪵 arrived in Unicode 13.0 alongside 🪨 (Rock), 🪺 (Nest with Eggs), and 🧋 (Bubble Tea). One of the most eclectic material-emoji batches ever approved.
• •Robert Todd Lincoln, Abraham's son, flatly said the actual log cabin his father was born in "was a decayed ruin long before my father's election as President." The cabin enshrined in granite in Kentucky isn't the real one. Americans built a temple around a replica anyway.
• •The emoji screen-reader announcement is just "wood," which is the rare case of an emoji whose accessible name is shorter and clearer than the image.

• •The Lincoln log cabin. American civic mythology built around the idea that Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin. The cabin currently enshrined in Kentucky is almost certainly not the original. Tree-ring dating put some of its logs at 1848, four decades after Lincoln's birth. Didn't stop 100,000 Americans from funding a granite temple around it. 🪵 carries a century of rags-to-riches iconography in a single glyph.
• •Lincoln Logs the toy. The toy set named for the president was invented in 1916 by John Lloyd Wright. The toy made "log" the shape every American kid learned first.
• •Morning wood as slang. Dictionary.com traces the term to mid-20th-century American slang. 🪵 arriving in 2020 gave the joke its first single-emoji form, and the pairing showed up on Twitter within days of the Unicode release.

• •Codepoint: U+1FAB5U+1FAB5. Unicode 13.0 (2020). Single character, no modifier or skin tone support.
• •CLDR short name: "wood." Keywords: wood, lumber, timber. No alternative presentation.
• •Shortcodes: :wood::wood: on most platforms. Discord and Slack both accept it.
• •Screen readers announce "wood." Short and unambiguous.

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