🦁Lion Emoji
Generally, the 🦁 emoji means you want to appear strong and confident. It's often used to show you’re feeling brave or like a leader.
The 🦁 emoji represents a lion, and it’s often used to show strength, bravery, or leadership.
- Unicode
- U+1F981
- Released
- 2015
- Shortcode
- :lion_face:
- Skin tones
- No
What does the 🦁 Lion emoji mean?
People search for it under a lot of different names. All of these point at the same character.
Lion emoji on iPhone, Android, WhatsApp and X
Same code on both ends, different drawing on each screen — here is the lion 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.
Lion emoji copy and paste
Everything here is the same character in different notation — including the shortcode chat apps know it by, :lion_face:.
In your code
Pick the notation your language wants. They all resolve to the lion, code point U+1F981.
How to type the 🦁 Lion emoji
No picker to hand? The lion can be typed straight from the keyboard — the codes for that are below, one per system.
Lion emoji PNG and SVG
Grab the lion 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
Lion emoji combinations
Ready-made combos built around lion 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
The same character carries a different intent depending on the sender and the message before it.
What 🦁 means in other countries
Universally a symbol of strength and leadership, though the specific pride attached to it changes by country.
Ties to the England football team, the ‘Three Lions’, in sports talk.
National emblem — the country’s name literally means ‘Lion City’.
Lion of Judah is a serious religious and cultural emblem, not casual.
Before you send it: Safe for praise and pride; skip it in Rastafari or Ethiopian religious contexts unless you mean the symbol.
What 🦁 means on TikTok, WhatsApp and Discord
One code point, several readings — where the lion lands changes how it is taken.
Where the 🦁 Lion emoji came from
Approved as part of Emoji 1.0, the lion has been on phones for years now — counting from its release, 11.
Same character every time — U+1F981 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.
Lion was approved as U+1F981 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.