Japanese “prohibited” button

What 🈲 means

The kanji 禁 ('forbidden') in a red box. It means prohibited, banned, or not allowed.

In Japan the character appears on signs such as 禁煙, no smoking. People use 🈲 to say something is off limits, like a banned topic at dinner. Chinese readers know it too and read it the same way.

Facts

Japanese “prohibited” button 🈲 is an emoji in the symbols category, under alphanum. It is one of the early emoji from Japanese phones, standardized in Unicode 6.0 (2010). On GitHub, Slack and other apps you can type it as :u7981: or :japanese_prohibited_button:. People also look for it with words like “Japanese”, “button”, “ideograph”, or “prohibited”.

Timeline

1. 2010Added to the emoji standard (Unicode 6.0)

Design history

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

symbols · Unicode 6.0