Waving hand Emoji

People

A yellow hand with fingers spread, palm facing forward, captured in a side-to-side motion. This gesture serves as a universal sign for greeting someone or signaling a departure.

Usage Context

This is the go-to emoji for starting a conversation with a quick 'hi' or ending one with a 'goodbye.' It is frequently used in chat threads to acknowledge someone entering a room or to wave off a friend at the end of a long message chain. It is often paired with 👋-adjacent gestures like 🖐 or 🙋.

History

Part of the original Unicode 6.0 set released in 2010, the waving hand was modeled after the distinct hand-waving animations found in early Japanese mobile carrier emoji sets, which were designed to add personality to basic text messages.

Details

Glyph

👋

Unicode

U+1F44B

Shortcode

:emoji_u1f44b:

HTML Entity

&#xD83D;&#xDC4B;

Specifications

Vendor Google

Category People

Subcategory hand-fingers-open

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