Emoji dictionary
🔥 Fire emoji
What does  Fire emoji mean?
The fire emoji is a flame that is mostly yellow with a little red on the top. It is used to signify that something is cool, awesome, exciting, or more colloquially, “on fire.” It can also convey that someone is sexy, (i.e., hot), or refer to other various metaphorical fires.
Where does 🔥 Fire emoji come from?
The fire emoji is also called the flame, hot, or lit emoji. It is commonly used to praise someone or something, signifying that a person, object, album, movie, or so on, is “lit,” a slang term to describe something that is exceptionally cool or great. As lit is also slang for “intoxicated,” the fire emoji doubles as a way to say someone is very high or wasted. The term fire has been used as slang for high-quality weed in hip-hop since the early 1990s, and so sometimes the fire emoji is used to reference marijuana.
I rarely use the fire emoji but this Sally Jenkins column about Serena and Osaka is 🔥🔥🔥.https://t.co/W4Yg3TSa6I
— Lon Chaney Jr. (@chaneyj) September 9, 2018
Due to its prominence, the American Dialect Society chose dumpster fire, a disastrous situation, as its 2016 Word of the Year, often represented as ️ on social media (a wastebasket plus fire emoji).
Fire emoji was included as part of Unicode 6.0 in 2010 and added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015.
Examples of 🔥 Fire emoji
Who uses 🔥 Fire emoji?
The fire emoji can also evoke the idiom, “to be on fire,” with the emoji symbolizing that a person is doing something extremely well, like playing guitar. Additionally, the fire emoji is a way to express that a person is very attractive, (e.g., “Girl looks ”). This use is a play on the slang term hot, meaning “sexy” or “really good looking,” and is applied to everyone from one’s boyfriend or girlfriend to celebrities.
.@BTS_twt slay America’s Got Talent with IDOL performance 🔥🔥🔥 #BTSonAGT https://t.co/J0pDxcD2Bu
— Metro (@MetroUK) September 13, 2018
When paired with other emoji, though, the fire emoji can take on more negative meanings that draw on the literal sense of fire. For example, if a person messages ➡️ , they might be saying “Go die in a fire” to someone they’re very mad at. Sometimes, the fire emoji signifies a flamewar, which is a heated fight between two people online.
On the messaging app Snapchat, the fire emoji is used as a special reward. Here, the fire emoji indicates when someone has a “Snapstreak” with another user, which means that they have “snapped” (sent pictures or videos) back and forth for at least three consecutive days, as if their friendship is on fire.
Note
This is not meant to be a formal definition of 🔥 Fire 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 🔥 Fire emoji that will help our users expand their word mastery.