Graduation cap

What 🎓 means

A square mortarboard with a tassel, the hat worn at graduation. People send it to celebrate finishing school, earning a degree, or completing any course of study.

Shows up in congratulations messages and on cap-and-gown photos, usually with 🎉 or 🥳. Students also use it for exam season, applications and study talk. As a joke, it marks an informal skill: “just earned my degree in overthinking 🎓.”

Facts

Graduation cap 🎓 is an emoji in the objects category, under clothing. It is one of the early emoji from Japanese phones, standardized in Unicode 6.0 (2010). 3 other emoji use it as a building block. On GitHub, Slack and other apps you can type it as :mortar_board: or :graduation_cap:. People also look for it with words like “cap”, “celebration”, “clothing”, or “education”.

Timeline

1. 2010Added to the emoji standard (Unicode 6.0)
2. 20162 new emoji built from it (Emoji 4.0)👨‍🎓👩‍🎓
3. 2019New emoji built from it (Emoji 12.1)🧑‍🎓

Design history

Google Noto Emoji images: Apache 2.0. Twemoji graphics by X Corp and contributors: CC-BY 4.0.

objects · Unicode 6.0