🦀Crab Emoji
Generally, the crab emoji just means “crab. ” It’s a visual representation of the animal.
The 🦀 emoji represents a crab.
- Unicode
- U+1F980
- Released
- 2015
- Shortcode
- :crab:
- Skin tones
- No
What does the 🦀 Crab 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 cancer emoji.
Crab emoji on iPhone, Android, WhatsApp and X
The character is always U+1F980 — but every vendor draws it their own way. This is what your crab looks like to the person on the other side.
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.
Crab emoji copy and paste
Tap any value to copy it. The emoji itself works everywhere, the escapes are for your code, and the shortcode Slack and Discord expect is :crab:.
In your code
Escapes for the languages people actually paste this into. Every one of them produces the same character, and that character is U+1F980.
How to type the 🦀 Crab emoji
Every system hides the emoji key somewhere else. Here is where, plus the raw codes for U+1F980 when there is no key at all.
Crab 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
Crab emoji combinations
Ready-made combos built around crab 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 in other countries
Reads as food or a grumpy mood in the West, and as a warning about jealousy through the ‘crab mentality’ idiom.
Standard seafood reference, especially in coastal or Southern US cuisine.
‘Crabby’ describes someone in a bad, irritable, short-tempered mood.
‘Crab mentality’ describes people pulling down others who try to rise.
Before you send it: Fine for food or mood talk; know the ‘crab mentality’ reading before using it about group dynamics.
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.
Where the 🦀 Crab emoji came from
It arrived with the 1.0 release of the standard, which dates the crab to 2015.
Same character every time — U+1F980 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.
Crab was approved as U+1F980 and shipped in Emoji 1.0 (2015). Phones usually get new artwork about a year after approval, in a system update.
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.