The telephone emoji ☎️ is the classic landline—rotary vibes, desk weight, and that satisfying clack when you hang up on drama. It signals “call me,” “hotline is open,” or a retro flourish when texting about office hours, customer service, or your inner 80s movie character. Online, people drop it flirtatiously after sharing a number, sarcastically when they’d actually prefer 47 texts instead, or dramatically to say the phone is “blowing up.” It’s also meme-ready for Drake’s Hotline Bling, “Call Me Maybe,” or a Who Wants to Be a Millionaire–style “phone a friend.”
On Apple devices, ☎️ shows a glossy black rotary desk phone with a chunky curved handset on a cradle, angled in a three‑quarter view. You can spot the round dial with finger holes and a reflective, almost museum‑piece shine—instant nostalgia in icon form. Compared to 📞 (telephone receiver), this one feels more formal, office-y, and throwback—think landline on grandma’s hallway table or the Batphone without the red paint. It’s great for posts about analog aesthetics, prank-call jokes, telemarketer woes, or that ominous “we need to talk” energy.
Use it to announce you’re taking calls, to jokingly threaten a “manager call,” or to set a cinematic tone (horror movie landline rings at 3 AM, anyone?). Bonus: it reads as authoritative in business bios and old-school cool in retro edits, all while winking at a generation that barely knows a dial tone.
Definition
CALL HIM! We're sorry. If you would like to make a call, hang up, and try again. An old red corded telephone. In history it was used for making calls.
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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.
The code generated for this emoji was changed slightly in iOS 7 / OSX 10.9 (a variation selector was added) advising the OS to display character emoji style instead of black and white text when available. We don't mind Apple, thank you! We just love our emojis! [Sources 11438-emoji-var.pdf 13.7 Variation Selectors (unicode.org)]
