The spouting whale is big-splash energy in a tiny square: a cheerful cetacean blasting water like it just nailed a cannonball. People drop it when they’ve got huge news, a wave of emotions, or when they’re dramatically “blowing off steam” after a long day. It can be playful (whale hello there), sarcastic (me, handling stress: 🐳💦), or used as a beach-day stamp on Instagram captions. It also doubles as a “hydration check” joke and a stand-in for overwhelmed vibes—because sometimes your feelings need a blowhole.
On Apple/iOS, it’s a chubby, left-facing blue whale with a shiny gradient body, tiny pectoral fin, upturned tail, and a clean burst of water from its blowhole. The face is friendly and slightly smirky, with that rounded cartoon style iOS loves; the white belly and gentle shading make it read instantly as cute rather than colossal. You can practically hear the “fwoosh.”
Culturally, it nods to everything from “Thar she blows!” to Moby-Dick and Free Willy, and it surfaces in save-the-whales convo threads. It sneaks into fandom talk (hello, 52-hertz lonely whale lore and BTS’s Whalien 52 shout-outs), sea shanty TikTok jokes, and aquarium selfies. Pair it with waves for dramatic effect, or send it ironically when your notifications are flooding—because yes, your group chat is the ocean now.
Definition
Flipper comes to mind but this is actually Free Willy. He is blowing out all the cold air from the nostrils of his charming little head.
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Emoji History The emoji code/ image log of changes.
This emoji was part of the proprietary / non-standardized emoji set first introduced by Japanese carriers like Softbank. These emojis became part of the Apple iPhone starting in iOS 2.2 as an unlockable feature on handsets sold in English speaking countries.
In iOS 5 / OSX 10.7, the underlying code that the Apple OS generates for this emoji was changed.
Emoji General Information
Twitter Emoji Popularity (Rank)
306 of 2393
Apple/iOS Picture
Google Android Picture
Google Hangouts Picture
Twitter.com Picture
LG Emoji Picture
Samsung Emoji Picture
Phantom Open Emoji Picture
ASCII Conversion
"Short Code" Name
:whale:
Keywords
Previous Names:
Adorable Whale
Unicode Category Information
Unicode Category
Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs
Unicode Range
1F300–1F5FF
Unicode Subcategory
Animal Faces
Proposed Unicode Information & Notes
Unicode Category
Human/living Things
Unicode Subcategory
Animal Faces
Names & Annotations
SPOUTING WHALE
Symbol Information
U+1F433 proposed
Proposal Identifier
e-1C3
Character Mapping/Crosswalk Notes
DoCoMo
[クジラ]
KDDI
#246 くじら 「kujira」 U+E470 SJIS-F648 JIS-7529
Softbank
#128 #old84 くじら 「kujira」 U+E054 SJIS-F995
Emoji Character Encoding Data
Emoji Code Version
iOS 5 - Current
UTF-8 Unicode Character(s)
🐳
UTF-8 Character Count
1
Character(s) In Input
AppleColorEmoji Font (available in OSX/iOS)
🐳
Decimal HTML Entity
🐳
Hexadecimal HTML Entity
🐳
Hex Code Point(s)
1f433
Formal Unicode Notation
U+1F433
Decimal Code Point(s)
128051
UTF-8 Hex (C Syntax)
0xF0 0x9F 0x90 0xB3
UTF-8 Hex Bytes
F0 9F 90 B3
UTF-8 Octal Bytes
360 237 220 263
UTF-16 Hex (C Syntax)
0xD83D 0xDC33
UTF-16 Hex
d83ddc33
UTF-16 Dec
55357 56371
UTF-32 Hex (C Syntax)
0x0001F433
UTF-32 Hex
01F433
UTF-32 Dec
128051
Python Src
u"\U0001F433"
PHP Src
"\xf0\x9f\x90\xb3"
C/C++/Java Src
"\uD83D\uDC33"
Emoji Character Encoding Data (equivalent or similiar)
