390 emoji for people and body parts — everyone, from waving hands to whole professions. Tap any character to copy it, or search the whole category by name.
The grid below holds every standard emoji in this category. Click one to copy it to your clipboard; use the search box above if you already know the name.
This category covers gestures, bodies, families, and the people who do jobs — doctors, cooks, teachers, astronauts and more. It is also the category with the most variants, because a hand or a face can be drawn in several skin tones.
Gestures carry more meaning than faces in a busy feed: the folded hands read as thanks, the shrug as not knowing, the flexed bicep as confidence or sarcasm depending on context. For usernames, the pointing hands and the fist are the most used.
Unicode gives every emoji an English name. Knowing the name is useful, because it is what the search box matches and what other people use when they describe an emoji to you.
| Emoji | Official name | Usually means |
|---|---|---|
| 👋 | waving hand | waving hand |
| 🤚 | raised back of hand | raised back of hand |
| 🖐️ | hand with fingers splayed | hand |
| ✋ | raised hand | raised hand |
| 🖖 | vulcan salute | vulcan salute |
| 🫱 | rightwards hand | rightwards hand |
| 🫲 | leftwards hand | leftwards hand |
| 🫳 | palm down hand | palm down hand |
| 🫴 | palm up hand | palm up hand |
| 🫷 | leftwards pushing hand | leftwards pushing hand |
| 🫸 | rightwards pushing hand | rightwards pushing hand |
| 👌 | OK hand | OK hand |
| 🤌 | pinched fingers | pinched fingers |
| 🤏 | pinching hand | pinching hand |
| ✌️ | victory hand | victory hand |
| 🤞 | crossed fingers | crossed fingers |
| 🫰 | hand with index finger and thumb crossed | hand |
| 🤟 | love-you gesture | love-you gesture |
| 🤘 | sign of the horns | sign of the horns |
| 🤙 | call me hand | call me hand |
| 👈 | backhand index pointing left | backhand index pointing left |
| 👉 | backhand index pointing right | backhand index pointing right |
| 👆 | backhand index pointing up | backhand index pointing up |
| 🖕 | middle finger | middle finger |
| 👇 | backhand index pointing down | backhand index pointing down |
| ☝️ | index pointing up | index pointing up |
Every character on this page is a button, and the steps are identical on a phone, a tablet and a desktop:
Nothing is installed and nothing is uploaded. These are standard Unicode characters, so the device you are already holding knows how to draw them.
Ordinary text is safe everywhere. The problems start with two groups: characters that need a font the receiving device may not ship with, and applications that deliberately filter what you can type.
| Place | Works? | What to expect |
|---|---|---|
| Instagram, TikTok, X bio and captions | Yes | Symbols and emoji both display; a handful of rare glyphs may render as a box on older Android versions |
| Discord display name and messages | Yes | Almost everything works, including the rarer box-drawing characters |
| WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal | Yes | Full support for emoji and symbols |
| Word, Google Docs, Excel, Sheets | Yes | Fine on a desktop; fonts on older Office installs may miss the newest glyphs |
| Most online games (usernames) | Sometimes | Many titles strip anything outside their font. Test with one symbol first |
| SMS | Yes, but | An emoji can push a message into a longer billing segment |
The practical rule: if you are decorating a bio or a document, paste freely. If you are building a username that has to survive a game login screen, start with one character, confirm it appears, then add the rest.