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🦁Lion Emoji
🦁 is the lion emoji, U+1F981, one of 66 in the Mammals set. It arrived with Emoji 1.0 (2015) and is commonly used for alpha, animal and face.
What 🦁 lion means
Pets and wildlife carry most of the traffic here: 🐶 and 🐱 stand in for the animal you actually own, 🐻 and 🐨 work as plain affection, and 🦄 marks anything improbably rare, including a billion-dollar startup. The family's biggest drift is 🐐, which now almost always means greatest of all time. 🐻❄️ polar bear and 🐈⬛ black cat are ZWJ sequences added in Emoji 13.0.
Unicode tags this one alpha, animal and face and files it under Animals & Nature → Mammals.
Shortcodes
Type these instead of pasting — most chat apps expand them as you type.
Codes & technical data
| Unicode | U+1F981 | |
|---|---|---|
| HTML hex | 🦁 | |
| HTML decimal | 🦁 | |
| CSS | \1F981 | |
| JavaScript | \u{1F981} | |
| Python | \U0001F981 | |
| Java / C# | \uD83E\uDD81 | |
| Rust | \u{1f981} | |
| Swift | \u{1F981} | |
| PHP | \u{1F981} | |
| URL encoded | %F0%9F%A6%81 | |
| UTF-8 bytes | F0 9F A6 81 | |
| UTF-16 bytes | D83E DD81 | |
| Base64 | 8J+mgQ== | |
| Decimal | 129409 | |
| Introduced | Emoji 1.0 (2015) | |
Keywords
Appears in these collections
How to type 🦁
- Windows — press
Win + .and search “lion”. - macOS — press
Ctrl + Cmd + Spaceto open the character viewer. - iOS & Android — switch to the emoji keyboard and type “alpha”.
- Linux — press
Ctrl + Shift + U, then type1f981and Enter. - HTML — paste
🦁.
How 🦁 renders
The same character drawn with whichever emoji fonts your device has installed. Apple, Google and Microsoft each draw it differently, so what you see below depends on what you are reading this on.
- 🦁Apple
- 🦁Segoe
- 🦁Noto
- 🦁System
Frequently asked questions
What does the 🦁 lion emoji mean?+
🦁 is the lion emoji, tagged alpha, animal and face. Pets and wildlife carry most of the traffic here: 🐶 and 🐱 stand in for the animal you actually own, 🐻 and 🐨 work as plain affection, and 🦄 marks anything improbably rare, including a billion-dollar startup. The family's biggest drift is 🐐, which now almost always means greatest of all time. 🐻❄️ polar bear and 🐈⬛ black cat are ZWJ sequences added in Emoji 13.0.
What is the Unicode code for 🦁?+
lion is U+1F981. In HTML that is 🦁, in CSS \1F981, and in JavaScript \u{1F981}. The full table above lists every escape format.
When was the 🦁 emoji added?+
lion got its emoji presentation in Emoji 1.0 (2015). Platforms that shipped before that release may draw it in plain text, or not at all — that is why the same character can look different on an old phone.
Related emojis
More emojis from Mammals in Animals & Nature.
Added in Emoji 1.0 (2015)
Other emojis that shipped in the same Unicode release as 🦁 lion.