The calendar page 📅 — codepoint, alt-input shortcuts, and the specific Apple history behind why its date is frozen on July 17 almost everywhere. Click any symbol to copy it instantly.
📅 CALENDAR (U+1F4C5) is Unicode's shorthand for dates, deadlines, and scheduling — a torn calendar page pinned at the top. Look closely on most platforms and the date on it never changes: it's fixed at July 17, a design choice that traces back to a specific Apple product announcement and later became the reason an entire unofficial holiday exists. This page identifies the glyph itself — meaning, codepoint, and how to type it — then covers the July 17 backstory in full, including the platforms that don't follow it.
The core Unicode glyph — a single torn calendar page.
Emoji that often appear alongside a calendar in scheduling and reminder contexts.
📅 CALENDAR was added in Unicode 6.0 (2010), part of the original wave of Unicode emoji drawn from Japanese carrier sets. Apple's artwork for it — a torn calendar page — needed some date printed on it, and Apple picked July 17 as an in-house reference: on July 17, 2002, Apple announced iCal, its calendar app, at the Macworld Expo in New York, alongside Mac OS X 10.2 "Jaguar." The date on the emoji is a nod to the date the product it represents was born.
That in-house detail became a public holiday in 2014, when Emojipedia co-founder Jeremy Burge created World Emoji Day and picked July 17 specifically because it was already sitting on Apple's calendar emoji. Once the day caught on — brand campaigns, emoji rankings, and Unicode Consortium news now regularly cluster around it — several other vendors redesigned their own calendar emoji artwork to match July 17 too, so the date wouldn't look arbitrary or wrong to anyone comparing platforms.
One distinction worth being precise about: the July 17 date lives on the emoji character — a static image baked into the font, the same on every device running that font version. It's a different thing from the actual Calendar app icon on iOS and macOS, which reads the system clock and updates to show today's real date. Typing 📅 always pastes the frozen July 17 artwork; opening the Calendar app never does.
Unicode only specifies that a "calendar" emoji must exist — it doesn't dictate what date the artwork shows. For years, several vendors used the same trick Apple did: printing a date meaningful to their own company history instead of July 17. As widely documented by emoji trackers and reported in tech press, the table below summarizes who used what — treat vendor-specific rows as historically documented rather than a live, pixel-checked snapshot of today's exact artwork, since any vendor can revise its emoji set on its own schedule.
| Platform | Date shown | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Apple | July 17 | iCal announced at Macworld Expo, July 17, 2002 |
| Samsung, Google, JoyPixels, Mozilla | July 17 | Redesigned to match Apple / World Emoji Day |
| Microsoft | 21st (generic month) | No specific company-history date tied to it |
| Twitter/X (Twemoji, historically) | March 21 | Twitter's founding date |
| February 24 | WhatsApp's founding date | |
| May 14 | Mark Zuckerberg's birthday |
| Platform / Tool | Method |
|---|---|
| Windows | Emoji panel — Win + . (period), then search "calendar" |
| Mac | Character Viewer (Cmd+Ctrl+Space), search "calendar" |
| iOS / Android | Emoji keyboard, search "calendar" or "date" to insert 📅 |
| HTML | 📅 (decimal), or copy directly from this page |
| Unicode escape | U+1F4C5 in code, or \u{1F4C5} in JavaScript |
Apple's 📅 Calendar emoji artwork is fixed on July 17 as a nod to July 17, 2002 — the day Apple announced iCal, its calendar app, at the Macworld Expo in New York. Apple used that date as an in-house Easter egg on the emoji's artwork, and it stuck.
Yes. Emojipedia co-founder Jeremy Burge created World Emoji Day in 2014 and picked July 17 specifically because that's the date shown on Apple's calendar emoji — the holiday is a reference to the glyph, not the other way around.
Not originally. Apple started it, and other vendors' calendar artwork picked their own dates for years — Microsoft, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Facebook each used a different day tied to their own history. As World Emoji Day grew, most major vendors redesigned their artwork to match July 17 too. See the platform table above for specifics.
📅 Calendar (U+1F4C5) is a single torn-off page pinned at the top and is the one almost always drawn with the July 17 date. 📆 Tear-Off Calendar (U+1F4C6) depicts a two-ring daily desk calendar. 🗓️ Spiral Calendar (U+1F5D3) shows a full month grid with a spiral binding. All three mean roughly the same thing — a date, event, or reminder — and are interchangeable in casual use.
No — that's a different thing entirely. The iOS and macOS Calendar app icon updates live to show today's real date. Only the 📅 emoji character — the one you type and paste in messages — is a static image frozen on July 17.
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