Gear Emoji

Objects

A dark grey or metallic cogwheel with prominent, evenly spaced teeth. This icon is the universal shorthand for mechanical operation, engineering, and digital settings menus.

Usage Context

Used almost exclusively to indicate configuration menus, technical settings, or the 'back-end' of an app or website. It also represents industry, manual labor, or the concept of things 'turning' or working in tandem, frequently paired with 🔧 or 🔨 to signal maintenance or repair tasks.

History

Added to the Unicode standard in 2005, the gear has long served as a staple of computer interface design. It grew in popularity as operating systems moved away from purely text-based menus toward graphical user interfaces, where the gear became the standard visual anchor for preferences and system controls.

Details

Glyph

⚙

Unicode

U+2699

Shortcode

:emoji_u2699:

HTML Entity

⚙

Specifications

Vendor Google

Category Objects

Subcategory tool

Unicode Version 6.0

Emoji Version 1.0

License CC-BY 4.0

Google Noto License

Emoji graphics by Twitter/X, licensed under CC-BY 4.0

Noto Color Emoji graphics are copyrighted by Google Inc. and licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Font files may also be subject to the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1.

Apache 2.0 SIL OFL 1.1 Noto Repository