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👪 Family emoji

[fam-lee ih-moh-jee]

What does 👪 Family emoji mean?

We’re all one big happy 👪 …

The family emoji, 👪, depicts a family unit. Given the great diversity in family makeup, variations of the family emoji represent everything from single-parent and same-sex-parent families to families of different ethnic backgrounds to families with multiple children.

While the family emoji is often used literally, it’s also sometimes used as a metaphor to represent the idea of unity and togetherness.

Where does 👪 Family emoji come from?

The family emoji, approved under Unicode 6.0 in 2010, is meant to represent a family unit. The default family emoji depicts a father, mother, and son, all in the supposedly racially neutral color of bright yellow. However, in 2014, after thousands of social-media users and even celebrities like Miley Cyrus signed a petition calling for greater representation in emoji, Unicode added skin tone modifiers in 2015.

Since then, also based on popular demand, Unicode has made available a great number of family sequences to represent more diversity in family types (e.g., a mother and daughter, two fathers and two sons, a father with a daughter and a son) all in various skin tones.

While major vendors like Apple or Android haven’t implemented interracial emojis (though technically available), it was among the top 30 requested emoji of 2016 according to Emojipedia. Microsoft, however, noted the clamor. Its 2016 Windows 10 Anniversary Update came with a simple fix to make sure everyone felt represented: 52,000 different possible family emoji, though they have to be copy-and-pasted in as opposed to accessed directly in a native emoji set. It’s this sheer number that has so far deterred the likes of Apple, as they haven’t figured out how to fit them all on their emoji keyboard.

Emojipedia

Examples of 👪 Family emoji

Ready For Everything To Just Fall In Place 😩👩‍👩‍👧💍❤️
@Kelsoob22, August, 2018
Thank you Lord my family is complete 👪 he is everything I’ve ever wanted 💕
@PsyKy4, August, 2018
ME AND MY DAUGHTER 👨‍👧 SO MUFUKIN TIGHT🤞🏾 YOU CANT TELL US APART💙
@_gglizzyy, August, 2018

Who uses 👪 Family emoji?

Most often, the default family emoji is used to represent family in general, whether nuclear or extended. Typical examples involve a family picture or the birth of a baby.

Often times, the family emoji isn’t in reference to a biological family but rather a community such as a close group of friends or a baseball team.

https://twitter.com/payton_dietsch/status/749604377862647808

Sometimes, the family emoji transcends the literal idea of family and instead is used to simply represent the idea of unity and togetherness, from political ideology or to a common culture.

https://twitter.com/LADYEMILY96/status/1032327849510883329

In other situations, variations of the family emoji are used as a tool to advocate for or celebrate social policies, such as allowing for same-sex couples to adopt children.

NOTE

This is not meant to be a formal definition of 👪 Family emoji like most terms we define on Dictionary.com, but is rather an informal word summary that hopefully touches upon the key aspects of the meaning and usage of 👪 Family emoji that will help our users expand their word mastery.