Activities · Emoji 0.6
🏀Basketball Emoji
Generally, it just means basketball. People use it to talk about the sport or when something reminds them of it.
The basketball emoji (🏀) simply represents the sport of basketball.
- Unicode
- U+1F3C0
- Released
- 2010
- Shortcode
- :basketball:
- Skin tones
- No
01 — Meaning
What does the 🏀 Basketball emoji mean?
People search for it under a lot of different names. All of these point at the same character.
02 — Platforms
Basketball emoji on iPhone, Android, WhatsApp and X
Vendors keep repainting this one. Counting the archived versions further down, the basketball has been drawn in 5 ways.
See the whole set the way each system draws it — iPhone emojis, Android emojis, WhatsApp emojis and Discord emojis.
03 — Copy & codes
Basketball emoji copy and paste
Everything here is the same character in different notation — including the shortcode chat apps know it by, :basketball:.
All emoji copy and paste →In your code
Different notation, one result: whichever escape you paste, what comes out is U+1F3C0.
04 — How to type
How to type the 🏀 Basketball emoji
No picker to hand? The basketball can be typed straight from the keyboard — the codes for that are below, one per system.
05 — Download
Basketball emoji PNG and SVG
Grab the basketball as transparent PNG or SVG. Each system ships its own drawing, and the licence stays with the vendor, all 9 of them.
Emoji PNG library →
Apple
Google
Twitter / X
Facebook
WhatsApp
06 — Combinations
Basketball emoji combinations
Ready-made combos built around basketball for bios, captions and comments. Tap to copy.
All combinations →Want two emojis fused into one sticker instead of set side by side? Emoji Kitchen does that with 🏀, and there are more ready-made pairs in emoji combinations and aesthetic emoji combos.
08 — In conversation
What 🏀 means from a girl or a guy
The same character carries a different intent depending on the sender and the message before it.
09 — Apps
What 🏀 means on TikTok, WhatsApp and Discord
Chat apps do not change U+1F3C0, they change what it looks like and what people take it to mean.
11 — History
Where the 🏀 Basketball emoji came from
This one is older than Unicode emoji: Japanese carriers were drawing it on their handsets years before the standard existed, which it finally joined in 2010.
Same character every time — U+1F3C0 never changed. Only the drawing did, and only because each vendor redraws its own set. Someone on an older phone still sees the older picture.
Long before Unicode had emoji, Japanese carriers shipped their own picture sets.
🏀 existed there as
NTT DoCoMo E658, KDDI au E59A, SoftBank E42A.
Those codes are why it survived into the standard at all — Unicode had to keep Japanese messages readable.
Basketball was approved as U+1F3C0 and shipped in Emoji 0.6 (2010). Emoji 0.6 is the original 2010 batch that came over from the Japanese sets.
Every vendor keeps its own artwork, so 🏀 is redrawn by Apple, Google, Twitter / X, Facebook, OpenMoji, Samsung, Microsoft, WhatsApp, JoyPixels. The character you send never changes — only the picture does.
12 — FAQ