The handheld mic you reach for to talk about singing, karaoke, MC-ing, interviews, and mic-drop moments — not to be confused with the tripod-mounted studio microphone 🎙️. Click to copy it instantly.
Click to copy · U+1F3A4
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Character | 🎤 |
| Unicode code point | U+1F3A4 |
| Unicode name | MICROPHONE |
| Unicode block | Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs |
| Introduced in | Unicode 6.0 (2010) / Emoji 1.0 |
| Category | Object emoji (sound & music) |
The microphone emoji (🎤, U+1F3A4 MICROPHONE) depicts a handheld mic with its head angled toward the mouth — the shape used for singing, karaoke, hosting, interviews, stand-up, and mic-drop moments. It's been part of the standard emoji set since Unicode 6.0 in 2010, among the first wave of emoji folded in from Japanese mobile carrier fonts, and it renders in full color on every major platform without needing a variation selector. Click it below to copy it instantly.
🎤 entered Unicode 6.0 in October 2010 as part of a large batch of pictographs standardized from Japanese mobile carrier fonts — the proprietary emoji sets used by DoCoMo, KDDI (au), and SoftBank in the years before every phone spoke a common character set. Because it's from that original wave, it was already treated as a full-color pictograph from day one and never needed a variation selector to render as emoji, unlike some symbols that predate the emoji era and default to plain text.
Its close relative, the tripod-mounted 🎙️ Studio Microphone (U+1F399), tells the opposite story: it wasn't encoded until Unicode 7.0 in 2014, four years later, and — because it comes from Unicode's general symbol repertoire rather than the original carrier set — it still defaults to a plain black-and-white glyph on some systems unless followed by the emoji variation selector (U+FE0F). That gap is the main reason the two microphones are so often confused: one has always been an emoji everywhere, the other sometimes needs a nudge to look like one.
The handheld mic itself — ready to paste anywhere emoji are supported.
Symbols people reach for expecting the handheld mic, but that are actually separate, differently-coded emoji.
| Method | Input |
|---|---|
| Windows emoji picker | Win + . or Win + ;, then search "microphone" |
| Mac emoji picker | Control + Command + Space |
| iOS / Android emoji keyboard | Search "mic" or "microphone" |
| Discord / Slack / GitHub shortcode | :microphone: |
| HTML | 🎤 or 🎤 |
| CSS content | content: "\1F3A4" |
🎤 is one of dozens of tech, household, and office emoji in the full object emojis library.
Browse Object Emojis →Every everyday-item emoji — tech, household, and office — including the microphone, browsable in one grid.
Ready-made emoji pairings for bios and captions, including music and performance themes.
Unicode music notation — ♪ ♫ ♬ — the text-based cousin of the music emoji family.
🎤 represents a handheld microphone and is used to signal singing, karaoke, public speaking, interviews, podcasts, or a stand-up comedy set — and, especially paired with 🔥 or all caps, a "mic drop" moment where something is said so decisively there's nothing left to add.
🎤 Microphone (U+1F3A4) is the handheld mic angled toward the mouth — the one you picture at karaoke or on a talk show. 🎙️ Studio Microphone (U+1F399) is the larger, tripod-mounted broadcast mic used for podcasts and radio. They're separate Unicode characters encoded four years apart (2010 vs. 2014), not the same emoji rendered two ways.
On Windows, press Win + . or Win + ; to open the emoji picker and search "microphone." On Mac, press Control + Command + Space. On iOS and Android, open your emoji keyboard and search "mic." In Slack, Discord, and GitHub, typing :microphone: also inserts it.
No — Unicode has never encoded a standalone mic-drop gesture. People express it by pairing the microphone emoji with other emoji (🎤⬇️ or 🎤💥) or simply typing "mic drop" after 🎤.