👦Boy Emoji
Generally, 👦 means a boy or young child. It’s often used just to represent the image of a boy, without a deeper meaning.
The 👦 emoji represents a young boy.
- Unicode
- U+1F466
- Released
- 2010
- Shortcode
- :boy:
- Skin tones
- Yes
What does the 👦 Boy emoji mean?
People search for it under a lot of different names. All of these point at the same character.
People also look for it as son emoji.
Boy emoji on iPhone, Android, WhatsApp and X
The character you send is always U+1F466. The picture is not: it is redrawn by each system, and the designs below number 9.
iPhone, iPad, macOS
Android, Gmail, Chrome
X, Discord, Twemoji apps
Facebook, Messenger
Open-source, design systems
Galaxy, One UI
Windows, Teams, Fluent
WhatsApp on Android
Slack, Discord themes
See the whole set the way each system draws it — iPhone emojis, Android emojis, WhatsApp emojis and Discord emojis.
Boy emoji skin tones
👦 supports all five Fitzpatrick skin tone modifiers. Each one is a separate character sequence — tap any to copy it.
Boy emoji copy and paste
Everything here is the same character in different notation — including the shortcode chat apps know it by, :boy:.
In your code
Different notation, one result: whichever escape you paste, what comes out is U+1F466.
How to type the 👦 Boy emoji
No picker to hand? The boy can be typed straight from the keyboard — the codes for that are below, one per system.
Boy emoji PNG and SVG
Transparent PNG and SVG for thumbnails, decks and design files — one file per vendor, which makes 9. Artwork belongs to whoever drew it, so check the licence before commercial use.
Apple
Google
Twitter / X
Boy emoji combinations
Ready-made combos built around boy for bios, captions and comments. Tap to copy.
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.
What 👦 means from a girl or a guy
Same emoji, different intent depending on who sent it and what came before.
What 👦 means on TikTok, WhatsApp and Discord
The character is the same everywhere, but the artwork and the reading of it change from app to app.
👦 vs 🤠 — what is the difference?
Two emojis that get mixed up constantly. They are different characters with different names.
Unicode name: Boy
Code: U+1F466 · added 2010
Shortcode: :boy:
Generally, 👦 means a boy or young child.
Unicode name: Cowboy Hat Face
Code: U+1F920 · added 2016
Shortcode: :face_with_cowboy_hat:
Usually, it just means someone is feeling a little bit playful or wants to seem a bit western.
Where the 👦 Boy 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+1F466 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 E6F0, KDDI au E4FC, SoftBank E001.
Those codes are why it survived into the standard at all — Unicode had to keep Japanese messages readable.
Boy was approved as U+1F466 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.