🏁 Chequered Flag emoji

The Chequered Flag emoji 🏁, also popularly called Checkered Flag emoji or Racing Flag emoji, was approved under Unicode 6.0 in 2010. On most major platforms, the emoji depicts a flag with a black-and-white checkerboard pattern attached to a grey flag pole. The Facebook version of the emoji lacks a flag pole. The exact size and pattern of the flag varies by platform. The Google, Samsung, and WhatsApp versions of the emoji have the flag pole slanted toward the left.

Checkered flags (or chequered if you follow British spelling) in racing date back to the 1906 American Automobile Association’s Glidden Tour, when the flag was used to signal to drivers the checkpoints they needed to stop at. The particular flag depicted in the the Chequered Flag emoji 🏁 is also traditionally used by a racing official to signal the end or the finish line of a motor car race. For this reason, the Chequered Flag emoji 🏁 is often used with the Racing Car emoji 🏎️ to talk about major races or popular motor car racing organizations, such as NASCAR or Formula One auto racing.

More generally, the Chequered Flag emoji 🏁 is used to refer to any kind of race. The Chequered Flag emoji 🏁 is also used metaphorically to compare tough challenges or trials to long races or marathons. So, a person may use the Chequered Flag emoji 🏁 to mean they finished a hard task or are “looking toward to the finish line” if they are still in the middle of a challenging journey.