Thinking Face Emoji 🤔

Added 7 years ago by Don • Updated about a month ago by Kevinvq2

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Rethinking SELECT A FORM. IS THIS FORM CORRECT? YES NO @paxiti

About • Origin • Spread • Search Interest •

Category: Meme Status: confirmed Origin: Region:

Type: Emoticon

Tags: emoji thinking chin thumb thinker throwing shade

About

The Thinking Face Emoji 🤔 is a circular emoji featuring a face with a raised eyebrow, down-turned mouth and a single hand appearing to scratch its chin, which is commonly used to convey confusion or deep thought.

Origin

In 2015, the Thinking Face was added to Unicode 8.0 and Emoji 1.0 with the code "U+1F914". The circular face is displayed differently on a variety of platforms, including Apple, Google and Microsoft (shown below).^[3]

Spread

On December 7th, 2015, NY Mag^[1] published an article about the emoji's use on Twitter.

On November 16th, 2016, Redditor TheAnt317 submitted a post asking "Why is the 'Thinking Face' emoji suddenly a meme?" to /r/OutOfTheLoop. On January 5th, 2017, Instagram user @wikkp209 posted a video of a van falling backwards while driving down a road with the caption "Someone please explain this 🤔🤔" (shown below). Within two months, the video gained over 71,500 views.

#TbT I'm still confused 🤔🤔🤔

A post shared by willp209 Memetangclan (@willp209) on Jan 5, 2017 at 7:26pm PST

On February 14th, journalist Glenn Greenwald sarcastically tweeted that the emoji signals someone "made a very clever, original, wry and amusing" refutation of someone else's tweet (shown below).^[4]