Rainbow

What 🌈 means

A bright arc of colors after rain. It stands for hope, joy and better days ahead, and it is a widely used symbol of LGBTQ+ pride.

Pride Month posts, bios and coming-out messages use it, often with 🏳️‍🌈 or 💖. It also cheers up hard news ("after the storm comes a 🌈") and decorates kids' parties.

🏳️‍🌈 is the pride flag itself; 🌈 can mean pride or just a rainbow, so context decides.

Facts

Rainbow 🌈 is an emoji in the travel and places category, under sky weather. It is one of the early emoji from Japanese phones, standardized in Unicode 6.0 (2010). One other emoji uses it as a building block. On GitHub, Slack and other apps you can type it as :rainbow:. People also look for it with words like “gay”, “genderqueer”, “glbt”, or “glbtq”.

Timeline

1. 2010Added to the emoji standard (Unicode 6.0)
2. 2016New emoji built from it (Emoji 4.0)🏳️‍🌈

Design history

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

travel & places · Unicode 6.0