Yawning Face Emoji

A yellow face caught mid-yawn, with eyes closed and mouth wide open, covered by a hand. 🥱 is the polite version of being bored. The hand over the mouth follows yawning etiquette, which makes this emoji slightly more socially acceptable than just typing "boring."

The dual meaning is clean: tired or bored. "It's past midnight 🥱" (sleepy). "This lecture 🥱" (uninterested). Both work because yawning happens in both states. That ambiguity is the emoji's defining feature: it lets you be dismissive while maintaining plausible deniability. "I was just tired."

🥱 was approved in Unicode 12.0 (2019). The proposal (L2/17-432) was submitted by Jay Peters, a journalist at The Verge and former Techmeme editor, who argued there was no emoji capturing the act of yawning. 😴 is already asleep. 😪 has a snot bubble. 😫 is frustrated. None of them yawn. Peters heard about emoji proposals on the Welcome to Macintosh podcast in August 2017, submitted his proposal, got accepted in January 2018, and wrote about the process for The Verge. He also created the waffle emoji.

Here's the science angle: yawning is one of the most contagious human behaviors. A 2014 Duke study of 328 participants found 67.7% yawned contagiously at least once during observation. Video triggers 40-60% of viewers. Audio alone gets 49%. Even reading about yawning can trigger it. Whether 🥱 on a screen fires the same reflex is untested, but the threshold appears to be remarkably low. You might be yawning right now.

🥱 is blunt. More so than most emoji. Sending 🥱 in response to someone's message says "you're boring me" in a way that's hard to sugarcoat. The hand covering the mouth adds a veneer of politeness, but the message is clear. It lands in the same passive-aggressive territory as 👍 and 🙂, emojis that Gen Z considers loaded depending on context.

As a boredom indicator: "This meeting 🥱" or "Same conversation again 🥱" or just replying to a long message with 🥱. It's dismissive. It's a power move. Used between friends, it's playful teasing. Used on a stranger's content, it's shade. The distinction matters: directing 🥱 at a situation is commentary, directing it at a person is confrontation.

As a tiredness indicator: "Past my bedtime 🥱" or "Fourth hour of studying 🥱." Here the yawn is literal and carries no judgment. Paired with 😴 or 💤, the sleepy meaning is unambiguous.

The third use is subtler: the contagious yawn tactic. Sending 🥱🥱🥱 in a group chat to hint that it's time to wrap up. Or dropping a single 🥱 to signal "I'm fading, talk tomorrow." It's a polite exit strategy, softer than leaving the chat, more honest than staying silent.

Google Trends data tells an ironic story. 🥱 spiked to 84 right after its late-2019 launch (novelty effect), then steadily declined to 33 by early 2026. Meanwhile, 😴 climbed from 30 to 70 over the same period. The crossover happened mid-2021. The emoji designed to fill a gap left by 😴 ended up losing ground to it. People searched for the yawning face out of curiosity, then went back to what they knew. An emoji about losing interest lost the public's interest.

The story of 🥱 starts with a podcast. In August 2017, Jay Peters, then an editor at Techmeme, listened to Mark Bramhill's Welcome to Macintosh podcast about how emoji proposals work. Bramhill mentioned that "literally anyone" could submit one. Peters noticed a gap: no emoji captured the act of yawning. 😴 was already asleep. 😪 had a manga snot bubble. 😫 was frustrated. The space between "awake" and "asleep" had no representative.

He submitted proposal L2/17-432 to the Unicode Consortium, describing a face resembling the "face with hand over mouth" emoji but with an open mouth and partially shut eyes. Unicode responded in November 2017 that the proposal "seems well formed" and suggested minor edits. Peters got his document number in January 2018. On February 5, 2019, nearly a year and a half after his quest began, 🥱 was approved as part of Emoji 12.0. Peters later proposed the waffle and saluting face emojis too.

But the gesture is far older than the emoji. Covering your mouth while yawning isn't just etiquette. It's rooted in medieval superstition. In medieval Europe, people believed that yawning opened a passage for demons to enter the body, and for the soul to escape. The Pope himself reportedly instructed Christians to make the sign of the cross when yawning. In colonial America, people snapped their fingers while yawning to scare away evil spirits. In Islamic tradition, yawning is associated with Shaytan (Satan), while sneezing is considered a blessing from Allah. The habit of covering your mouth persisted long after the superstition faded. 🥱 encodes this centuries-old reflex: even as an emoji, it covers its mouth.

The science of yawning adds another layer. The leading theory is thermoregulation: yawning cools the brain. The deep inhalation brings in ambient air that lowers blood temperature via counter-current heat exchange. Studies confirmed that brain temperature drops by about 0.11°C after a yawn. There's even a "thermal window": contagious yawning peaks around 20°C and diminishes when it's very hot (37°C in Arizona summers) or freezing (Vienna winters). Your body yawns to keep your brain at operating temperature.

Yawning etiquette varies by culture, but the core response is nearly universal: cover your mouth.

In Japan, Korea, and China, showing the inside of your mouth to others is considered rude and indecent. This goes beyond yawning. Japanese women historically concealed their mouths when laughing, a tradition dating to the Nara period (710-794 AD). During that era, women dyed their teeth black (ohaguro) and hid them with their hand or kimono sleeve. The habit of mouth-covering during yawning fits into this broader cultural norm of oral modesty.

In Islamic tradition, yawning is believed to come from Shaytan, and covering the mouth while yawning is a religious recommendation. Sneezing, by contrast, is considered a blessing from Allah.

In the West, the etiquette is less codified but still strong. Not covering a yawn in public signals rudeness or disinterest. The medieval origin of this habit (preventing demons from entering your open mouth) is long forgotten, but the social norm persists.

The emoji 🥱 reflects the universal version: mouth covered, eyes closed. No culture-specific variation. It's one of the few face emojis that performs a gesture everyone on Earth recognizes.

• •🥱 was proposed by journalist Jay Peters after hearing on the Welcome to Macintosh podcast that anyone could submit emoji proposals. He also created 🧇 (waffle) and 🫡 (saluting face).
• •In medieval Europe, people believed yawning let demons enter the body and the soul escape. The Pope instructed Christians to make the sign of the cross while yawning. In colonial America, they snapped their fingers to scare away evil spirits. That's why we still cover our mouths.
• •Guinness World Records documents a case from 1888: a 15-year-old girl who yawned continuously for five straight weeks after having a tooth removed. Dr. Edward W. Lee eventually administered Belladonna to stop it, but that triggered violent sneezing instead.
• •67.7% of 328 participants yawned contagiously in a Duke study. Video triggers 40-60%. Audio alone triggers 49%. Reading about yawning may have already got you.
• •Dogs catch yawns from humans. A 2022 study found 69% of human participants yawned when watching animals from different species yawn. The contagion works both ways: dogs yawn more when watching their owners yawn than when watching strangers.
• •Yawning is thermoregulation: the deep inhalation cools blood flowing to the brain. Studies show brain temperature drops about 0.11°C after a yawn. The reflex peaks around 20°C and drops at extreme temperatures, because cooling isn't thermodynamically useful when it's already freezing.
• •A 2021 study across 50 nationalities found that people scoring high on psychopathic traits were less susceptible to contagious yawning. The finding went viral, but the strongest predictor was actually self-reported tiredness. Don't diagnose anyone based on a yawn.
• •The average yawn lasts about 6 seconds. David Rickert holds the human record at 6 minutes and 46 seconds. A Pomeranian named Bella holds the animal record at 23 minutes and 8 seconds.

• •The biggest one: 🥱 as a response to someone's message. The sender might be actually tired (it's 2am), but the receiver reads it as "you're boring me." The ambiguity is baked in. When in doubt, pair it with context: "I'm fading 🥱" clarifies everything.
• •Some people read 🥱 as a milder version of eye-roll (🙄). It's not. Eye-roll is active disrespect. 🥱 is passive disinterest. The distinction matters: 🙄 says "I disagree," 🥱 says "I don't care enough to disagree."
• •In cultures where mouth-covering is a broader etiquette norm (Japan, Korea), 🥱 reads as more polite than in cultures where yawning is just yawning. The hand gesture carries different weight.

• •Jay Peters created 🥱 after hearing a podcast. The Verge journalist and former Techmeme editor submitted Unicode proposal L2/17-432 in 2017 after learning on the Welcome to Macintosh podcast that anyone could propose an emoji. He also created 🧇 (waffle) and 🫡 (saluting face).
• •Netflix's Adolescence (2025) — An unscripted yawn during a police interrogation scene became one of the show's most talked-about moments. The actor yawned, his scene partner improvised "Am I boring you?" and the result was chilling.
• •The "Yawn and Reach" trope — TV Tropes documents the classic movie move where someone fakes a yawn to stretch and put their arm around their date. The trope is so well-known that 🥱 occasionally gets used to reference it ironically.
• •Baylor University's psychopathy study (2015) — Researchers found that people scoring high on psychopathic traits were less susceptible to contagious yawning. The study made headlines at Smithsonian, Today.com, and Boing Boing, briefly turning yawning into a pop-science empathy test.
• •The five-week yawn (1888) — Guinness World Records documents a case reported by Dr. Edward W. Lee: a 15-year-old girl who yawned continuously for five weeks after having a tooth removed. Belladonna eventually stopped the yawning but triggered violent sneezing instead.

• •Codepoint: U+1F971U+1F971. Unicode name: YAWNING FACE. Part of Unicode 12.0 (2019).
• •Common shortcodes: :yawning_face::yawning_face: (Slack, Discord, GitHub). Some platforms also support :yawn::yawn:.
• •No skin tone modifier support. The hand covering the mouth is part of the face design, not a separate hand element.
• •Visually similar to U+1F92DU+1F92D (🤭 face with hand over mouth). Both show a hand covering the mouth but convey different emotions. Ensure your emoji picker distinguishes them clearly.

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