Red envelope

What 🧧 means

A red money envelope, called hóngbāo in Mandarin and lai see in Cantonese. Elders give them at Lunar New Year and weddings to pass on good luck and money.

Lunar New Year greetings pair it with 🧨 and 🐉. In chat it can also mean "send me money" or announce a digital red packet in apps that support them.

Red signals luck in Chinese culture, so the envelope's color is part of the meaning.

Facts

Red envelope 🧧 is an emoji in the activities category, under event. It became part of the emoji standard in Emoji 11.0, released in 2018. On GitHub, Slack and other apps you can type it as :red_envelope:. People also look for it with words like “envelope”, “gift”, “good”, or “hóngbāo”.

Timeline

1. 2018Added to the emoji standard (Emoji 11.0)

Design history

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

activities · Emoji 11.0