Open Mailbox With Lowered Flag
Copy and paste the open mailbox with lowered flag symbol 📭 (U+1F4ED) instantly. Part of the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs Unicode block.
Works everywhere: websites, documents, social media, code editors
Character Codes
About This Symbol
- Name
- Open Mailbox With Lowered Flag
- Unicode Block
- Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs
- Code Point
- U+1F4ED
The Open Mailbox With Lowered Flag (📭) is a Unicode character assigned to the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block at code point U+1F4ED. This block contains characters used across a variety of applications including technical documentation, web development, mathematical notation, and everyday digital communication. The open mailbox with lowered flag symbol can be inserted directly into text or referenced through its HTML entity, CSS code, or JavaScript escape sequence for use in websites and applications.
How to Use
- 1.Click "Copy Symbol" above to copy 📭 to your clipboard
- 2.Paste it anywhere with Ctrl+V (or Cmd+V on Mac)
- 3.Or use the HTML entity
📭in your code - 4.For CSS, use
\1F4EDwith the content property
Understanding Open Mailbox With Lowered Flag
Among the characters in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block, the open mailbox with lowered flag (📭) at U+1F4ED fills a specific niche. Its inclusion in the Unicode standard reflects real-world demand for this particular symbol in digital text, enabling authors and developers to reference it unambiguously.
The hexadecimal value 1F4ED places this character at decimal position 128237 in the Unicode table. At this position, the character falls 13 positions past the nearest hex boundary, a detail relevant for font engineers mapping glyph tables. For practical use, 📭 in HTML or \u{1F4ED} in JavaScript are the most common insertion methods.
Known by its descriptive name referencing "open mailbox," this character serves a specific role that generic symbols cannot fill. It appears in specialized typography, technical standards, and digital content where precision in symbol choice directly affects meaning or layout.
About Emoji & Pictographs
Emoji have transformed digital communication, evolving from a niche feature of Japanese mobile phones into a universal visual language with over 3,600 characters. Unicode's pictograph blocks encode not just the familiar yellow faces but a vast taxonomy of objects, activities, animals, foods, flags, and symbols. ZWJ (Zero Width Joiner) sequences combine existing emoji into compound forms, while skin tone and hair modifiers enable representation across human diversity.
In 1999, Shigetaka Kurita designed 176 12-pixel emoji for NTT DoCoMo's i-mode mobile internet platform, drawing inspiration from manga, kanji, and weather forecast symbols. Competing Japanese carriers created incompatible emoji sets, fragmenting the mobile experience. Google and Apple's push to standardize emoji through Unicode, beginning around 2007 and formalized in Unicode 6.0 (2010), globalized what had been a Japanese phenomenon. The addition of skin tone modifiers in Unicode 8.0 (2015), gender variants, and the ZWJ mechanism for family configurations transformed emoji from simple pictographs into a system capable of representing human identity with increasing nuance.
Common Uses
- •Emotional expression in messaging and social media
- •Brand marketing and advertising campaigns
- •Reaction systems in communication platforms
- •Data visualization and informal surveys
- •Cross-language communication bridging linguistic barriers
Technical Notes: Emoji rendering is platform-dependent — each operating system and application provides its own emoji font with distinct artwork. ZWJ sequences work by joining existing emoji with U+200D: for example, woman + ZWJ + laptop produces a woman technologist on supporting platforms, but falls back to showing both emoji separately on older systems. Flag emoji use pairs of Regional Indicator Symbols rather than dedicated code points, allowing representation of any ISO 3166-1 country code. The emoji presentation selector (U+FE0F) forces emoji rendering for characters that have both text and emoji forms.
Cultural Context: Emoji interpretation varies dramatically across cultures. The folded-hands emoji serves as prayer in some contexts and a high-five in others. The thumbs-up gesture is offensive in parts of the Middle East. The pile-of-poo emoji, far from being frivolous, traces back to a Japanese cultural association between excrement and good luck. The Unicode Consortium's emoji subcommittee now fields hundreds of proposals annually, and decisions about which emoji to encode have become unexpectedly political — debates over the rifle emoji, the hijab emoji, and representation of disabilities reflect real-world social tensions playing out through tiny pictographs.