Microbe Emoji

Animals

A cartoonish, rounded green organism covered in small, protruding spikes or flagella. It represents the microscopic life forms invisible to the naked eye that occupy every corner of our environment.

Usage Context

Frequently used in conversations about health, hygiene, or sickness. It serves as a go-to icon when discussing the common cold, flu season, or more serious viral outbreaks. It is often paired with the 🧼 soap or 😷 face mask emoji to emphasize health precautions.

History

Added to the Unicode standard in 2018, this emoji was released as part of the health-focused expansion of character sets. It gained massive global usage during the 2020 pandemic as the primary visual shorthand for discussing viral transmission and scientific health updates.

Details

Glyph

🦠

Unicode

U+1F9A0

Shortcode

:emoji_u1f9a0:

HTML Entity

&#xD83E;&#xDDA0;

Specifications

Vendor Google

Category Animals

Subcategory animal-bug

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