🍆 is the eggplant, or aubergine in British English: a long purple vegetable with a green cap. It entered Unicode in 2010, inherited from Japanese phone emoji, and on paper it is a perfectly ordinary vegetable. In practice it became one of the textbook cases of an emoji with two lives, because on English-speaking social media its shape made it a stock innuendo. Which meaning you are looking at depends on the message around it.
How it’s used
- Cooking: “Eggplant parm for dinner tonight 🍆”
- The garden: “First eggplant of the season from the backyard 🍆”
- Recipe and food blogs: “Roasted aubergine with tahini and pomegranate 🍆”
- Meal prep: “Baba ganoush for the week 🍆”
- Food shopping: “Eggplants are cheap at the market right now 🍆”
Visually it is close to purple cousins like 🍇 and 🍠, but the long body and green cap set it apart. In cooking posts it often shows up next to 🍅, 🥒 and 🧄.
Korea, Japan and the English-speaking world
In English, it is both a vegetable and, online, a well-known bit of innuendo. Recipe accounts usually keep things clear by writing “eggplant” or “aubergine” in the caption. Some platforms have, at various times, limited hashtags or ad copy that used the emoji, so a food business posting it has a reason to pair it with plain words.
In Korea, 가지 is an everyday summer vegetable, served as seasoned namul, stir-fried, steamed or fried. The emoji is mostly read as just a vegetable and the slang meaning has not spread widely there, although it is worth knowing that foreign followers may read it differently.
In Japan, ナス has a place in New Year folklore: dreaming of Mount Fuji, a hawk and an eggplant on the first night of the year is said to be the luckiest dream (一富士二鷹三茄子). During Obon, families make a “spirit horse” of cucumber and a “spirit cow” of eggplant to carry ancestors back and forth, and there is a proverb about how delicious autumn eggplant is. As an emoji it is read almost entirely as a vegetable.
Where it gets misread
- A bare 🍆 sent by itself in English-language chat may not be about food. Check the context when talking with international users.
- In a business message or an ad aimed at English speakers, writing “eggplant” as a word alongside it is safer.
- Used together with 🍑, it will rarely be read as a produce-aisle comment.
- It does not tell the reader which variety you mean, such as Japanese, Italian or globe eggplant. Write it out when that matters.
Design differences by platform
Every platform shows a deep purple body with a green cap, but the degree of curve, the size of the cap, the shininess and the depth of color differ. Apple’s eggplant is glossy and three-dimensional, Google’s Noto is simpler and flatter, Microsoft’s Fluent has soft volume, and Samsung’s is similar with a slightly different tint. A more curved body or a straighter one changes the impression a little, but not the dictionary meaning.
