Why is there no emoji specifically for “Thanks” or “You’re Welcome,” anyway?

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Background:

There are a surprisingly huge number of emoji for expressing relatively rarely-used concepts, such as 🎍 (bamboo decoration), 🤾🏻‍♂️ (handball), 🎠 (carousel horse),  🛖 (thatched-roof cottage), and 🛋️ (couch and lamp).

The Issue:

Weirdly, there is no “standard” emoji for unambiguously expressing the concept “thanks!” or “you’re welcome!”

One commonly seen approximation is 🙏 : this can variously mean “prayer,” “good luck,” “thanks,” “you’re welcome,” etc.

The thumbs-up (👍) emoji is also often used to express the concept “you’re welcome.”

But really, we need a unique emoji for both concepts.

Since bizarre emoji are constantly being added to the Unicode specifications, it’s time to remedy this gap by adding emoji for “thanks” and “you’re welcome.”

Proposal:

It’s not instantly obvious how to express “thanks” wordlessly in a universal fashion.

As an initial proposal, let’s consider a situation in which a person (or animal) is thankful. Specifically, the situation where a horse has just been fed an apple:

🍎🔜🐴

This could also be expressed as a single emoji, as shown in Figure 1.

Similarly, to express “you’re welcome,” we can use multiple copies of the thumbs-up (👍) emoji: specifically, we are imagining a situation in which an octopus is giving multiple thumbs-ups, as in:

👍👍👍👍🐙👍👍👍👍

A single-emoji version of this concept is also shown in Figure 1.

Fig. 1: Left: the “horse eating an apple” emoji expresses the concept “thanks!” Right: the multi-thumbs-up-octopus emoji expresses the concept of “you’re welcome!” Here, we have determined that four thumbs-up is sufficient, although our octopus could theoretically deliver up to eight..

Conclusion:

If highly specific concepts like “pouring liquid” (🫗), the “nerd face” (🤓), and the Vulcan salute from Star Trek (🖖) can get an emoji, surely “thanks” and “you’re welcome” should each have one too!

PROS: Should help with communication across languages.

CONS: I’m no octopologist, but it’s highly likely that an octopus does not have thumbs, so the proposed emoji might promote incorrect beliefs about octopus biology.

Originally published 2025-04-21.