Man shrugging: medium skin tone Emoji

People

A man with a medium skin tone lifting his shoulders and palms upward in a universal gesture of uncertainty or apathy. The expression is blank, signaling a lack of knowledge or a 'whatever' attitude toward a situation.

Usage Context

This is the go-to emoji when you have no answer to a question, don't care about the outcome, or are feeling particularly helpless in a conversation. It frequently acts as a digital version of 'beats me' and pairs perfectly with the 🤷 or the face-palm 🤦🏽‍♂️ when expressing frustration.

History

The shrug gesture was added to the Unicode standard in 2016 as part of Emoji 3.0. It was specifically requested to fill the gap for non-verbal cues in mobile messaging, as users struggled to convey passive indifference using only text-based emoticons like the classic ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Details

Glyph

🤷🏽‍♂

Unicode

U+1F937 U+1F3FD U+200D U+2642

Shortcode

:emoji_u1f937_1f3fd_200d_2642:

HTML Entity

&#xD83E;&#xDD37;&#xD83C;&#xDFFD;‍♂

Specifications

Vendor Google

Category People

Subcategory person-gesture

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