🥱 Tired Emoji — Meaning & Copy
Yawning Face · Unicode U+1F971 · page updated November 04, 2026
What the tired emoji means
The 🥱 emoji - officially Yawning Face - shows a wide-open mouth, closed eyes and a hand curled beside the face mid-yawn, and it owns two jobs: honest sleepiness and unimpressed boredom. Joined Unicode in 2019 (Emoji 12.0) and quickly became the standard reply to being worn out, staying up too late, or hearing the same story a third time. The duality is old as yawning itself - a yawn means "tired" or "this is dull" depending on who yawns at what - and the emoji inherited both readings cleanly. It is gentler than 😑 for boredom and more specific than 😴 for tiredness: no sleeping involved, just the drained middle state.
When people use it — three real scenarios
Announce your own exhaustion
The direct use: end-of-day messages, post-deadline group chats, Monday-morning captions.
Reply to a dull take
As a reaction it says 'this is dragging' with less hostility than an eye-roll - usable among friends without starting a fight.
Tease a sleepy friend
Morning messages and late-night study pairs use it as a gentle 'go to bed' nudge.
Combinations that read like a sentence
Emoji stack into phrases. These pairs (and the full strings you can copy from each row) are the combinations real conversations settled on:
How it renders on different platforms
The hand-by-the-face detail appears on Apple and most Android skins but is simplified away on some platforms, where it reads as a plain big-mouth yawn - the meaning survives either way. There is genuine overlap risk with 😪 (sleepy face with a snot bubble), which implies drifting off, and 😴 (sleeping face, Z's), which implies already asleep; 🥱 is the process, not the endpoint. In workplace chats it reads as informal but harmless; in customer-facing writing, skip it - a yawn aimed at a product reads as a review even when you meant it about yourself.
Copy it anywhere in three steps
On this page, tap the big button under the emoji and it is in your clipboard. In any message app, long-press the text field and choose Paste. On desktop, Ctrl/Cmd+V pastes it wherever a cursor blinks - chat, document, bio field, spreadsheet. The emoji travels as a text character, so it adopts the recipient's platform style automatically: send from an iPhone to a Android phone and the Android user sees Android's drawing. Nothing to install, no sticker packs, no image files.
Related pages
😭 Sob emoji 📋 Copy-paste table 📖 All meanings
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between 🥱 and 😴?
🥱 is mid-yawn - tired or bored but awake. 😴 is asleep (with ZZZ). If the message is "I am drained," use 🥱; if it is "gone," use 😴.
Is 🥱 rude as a reply?
It can read as dismissive if aimed at someone's message. As a statement about yourself it is harmless. In group chats with people who do not know you well, prefer words.
How do I copy the tired emoji on a phone?
Tap the big copy button at the top of this page, or tap the emoji itself in any grid here - it lands in your clipboard instantly, ready to paste into any message, bio or document.
What is the Unicode for tired emoji?
Yawning Face is U+1F971 in Unicode. Copying copies the character itself - no image, no sticker - so it renders in the recipient's own font.