Symbol for family

Family emoji and how they are built

👪 is a single character, U+1F46A FAMILY. The other versions, such as 👨‍👩‍👧 or 👩‍👩‍👦, are sequences: several person emoji glued together with the invisible zero width joiner. Phones that know the sequence draw one picture; older systems show the individual people side by side. That is also why a family emoji can count as several characters in a username or text limit.

In 2023 Unicode added simpler silhouette families (🧑‍🧑‍🧒 and relatives) that avoid specifying gender. They need a recent system to display, so check your audience before relying on them.

Symbols used in family trees

Genealogy has its own shorthand, still common in German, Dutch and Scandinavian records and in many family-history programs:

• * born, as in * 1902. It is an ordinary asterisk.
• † died, as in † 1975. It is the dagger symbol, which recalls the Christian cross.
• ⚭ married, drawn as two linked rings. ⚮ means divorced and ⚯ an unmarried partnership.

Unicode added ⚭ ⚮ ⚯ in version 4.1 (2005), so genealogy texts can be written without images.

The family tree

Drawing ancestry as a tree goes back to medieval genealogies such as the Tree of Jesse, which showed Christ’s ancestors growing from a sleeping Jesse. Today “family tree” is simply the word for a pedigree chart, and 🌳 is its natural emoji. Trees also stand for life and continuity; see our symbols for life.

家 (home, family)

家 (jiā) means both home and family in Chinese. Its oldest forms show a pig under a roof, since keeping livestock at the house was a sign of a settled household. Japanese uses it for house (ie) and in words for family. Other meaningful characters are in our Chinese symbols collection.