😉Winking Face Emoji
Basically, it means they're smiling and winking, like they’re sharing a little secret or joke with you. It's a friendly way to show you they’re enjoying the conversation.
The winking face emoji (😉) is pretty common.
- Unicode
- U+1F609
- Released
- 2010
- Shortcode
- :wink:
- Skin tones
- No
- Popularity
- #23 most used
What does the 😉 Winking Face emoji mean?
People search for this character under a lot of different names, and the ones we have collected number 9.
People also look for it as wink face emoji, wink emoji, slide emoji.
Winking Face emoji on iPhone, Android, WhatsApp and X
Same code on both ends, different drawing on each screen — here is the winking face as 9 vendors ship it.
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.
Winking Face emoji copy and paste
Everything here is the same character in different notation — including the shortcode chat apps know it by, :wink:.
In your code
Pick the notation your language wants. They all resolve to the winking face, code point U+1F609.
How to type the 😉 Winking Face emoji
Where the emoji key lives on each system — and the codes for when there is no picker at all.
Winking Face emoji PNG and SVG
Grab the winking face as transparent PNG or SVG. Each system ships its own drawing, and the licence stays with the vendor, all 9 of them.
Apple
Google
Twitter / X
Winking Face emoji combinations
Ready-made combos built around winking face 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: Winking Face
Code: U+1F609 · added 2010
Shortcode: :wink:
Basically, it means they're smiling and winking, like they’re sharing a little secret or joke with you.
Unicode name: Winking Face with Tongue
Code: U+1F61C · added 2010
Shortcode: :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:
Basically, it means you're joking around and having a good time.
Where the 😉 Winking Face 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+1F609 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 E729, KDDI au E5C3, SoftBank E405.
Those codes are why it survived into the standard at all — Unicode had to keep Japanese messages readable.
Winking Face was approved as U+1F609 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.
People wrote it as
;), ;-) back when messages were plain text. Most keyboards still convert those automatically.