Winking face Emoji

Smileys

A yellow face with a slight smile and one eye closed in a wink. The expression gives off a playful, knowing vibe, suggesting that the sender is either joking, teasing, or sharing a private piece of information.

Usage Context

This is the go-to emoji for softening a sarcastic comment, signaling a flirtatious intent, or indicating that a message should be taken as a joke. It effectively bridges the gap between text and body language, often used alongside 😊 or 😏 to clarify tone in casual digital conversations.

History

The wink originated in early internet culture as the ASCII emoticon ;) used on bulletin board systems in the 1980s to show sarcasm. It was officially codified into Unicode 6.0 in 2010 as part of the initial wave of global emoji adoption, cementing its place as one of the most recognizable shorthand signals in digital communication.

Details

Glyph

😉

Unicode

U+1F609

Shortcode

:emoji_u1f609:

HTML Entity

&#xD83D;&#xDE09;

Specifications

Vendor Google

Category Smileys

Subcategory face-smiling

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