🫡 Saluting Face Emoji Meaning: Respect, Irony, o7

Few emojis manage to be sincere and sarcastic at the same time. The 🫡 saluting face does it all the time. Send it to a friend who just finished a marathon and it reads as respect. Send it to your manager after a last-minute Friday request and it reads as "yes, sir" with the eyes rolling slightly out of view.

This guide covers what the emoji means, where it came from, and how to tell which version someone is sending you.

Unicode's official name for it is simply "saluting face", and its keywords are ok, salute, sunny, troops and yes (Unicode Emoji 14.0 chart). In practice it has four common meanings.

Dictionary.com lists the same range, from sincere respect to sarcastic compliance and plain acknowledgment. The context, and who is sending it, does most of the work.

This is the literal meaning. People use it for first responders, soldiers and veterans, teachers on the last day of term, or a friend who did something brave or ridiculous. It pairs well with military medal 🎖️ or pleading face 🥺 when the respect comes with feelings.

In work chats and group plans, 🫡 has become a quick way to say you received an instruction and will do it. It is a little warmer than thumbs up 👍️ and a little less formal than typing "will do." The original proposal to Unicode predicted this: it listed acknowledging messages and affirmation as core uses (Daniel and Fuman, 2019).

The salute is a gesture of rank. Using it for something small or absurd flips that into a joke. "My mom told me to wear a jacket 🫡" is not a serious oath. For more emojis in this register, see our sarcasm and irony collection.

The salute is also a sign-off. That meaning became famous in November 2022 (more on that below).

People asked for a salute emoji for years before it arrived. A 2019 proposal by Jay Peters noted that a salute had appeared on published lists of the most-requested emojis three years in a row (L2/19-400). It also argued that the existing vulcan salute 🖖 needs Star Trek knowledge to make sense, while a plain salute is widely understood.

A second proposal later that year, by Jennifer Daniel and Shiraz Fuman, is the one usually credited with the emoji (L2/19-396). It pointed to the many Japanese kaomoji showing a similar gesture, and suggested combinations like 🫡🪖 for "support your troops" and 🫡☀️ for "sun in my eyes."

Salutes differ by country and branch. Writing about the emoji in 2025, Daniel explained that the design aimed for a gesture that feels like a salute without copying any single military tradition. That is part of why it travels so well across cultures and contexts.

Long before 🫡, gamers and streamers saluted each other with o7. The "o" is a head and the "7" is an arm raised to the brow. The emoji is a picture version of the same idea, and o7 is still common in Twitch chats and gaming communities.

After Elon Musk bought Twitter in late 2022, staff were asked to commit to an "extremely hardcore" work culture or leave. Many of those leaving posted 🫡 on Slack and then on Twitter itself, reported Business Standard. The same report said Google searches for the emoji had risen more than fourfold since February 2022.

The salute fit the moment because it carried all its meanings at once: goodbye, solidarity with coworkers, and a bit of dark humor about the situation. Rolling Stone went as far as calling it the best emoji of 2022.

A few quick signals help:

If the tone is unclear and it matters, ask. That is better than guessing wrong at work.

Mostly yes. As an acknowledgment it is friendly and clear. Be careful with the sarcastic version around people who might read it as mocking, and think twice before using it in a message about layoffs unless you know the team well. Our guide to emoji etiquette at work covers this in more detail, and the work and business collection has other safe picks.