🧅 onion Emoji — Meaning, Copy & Paste

What Does the onion Emoji 🧅 Mean?

A round yellow-brown onion with paper-thin skin and a small green sprout on top — the onion emoji rounds out the holy trinity of base cooking emojis (garlic, onion, butter) added to the keyboard in 2019. The classic supermarket-onion silhouette is instantly recognizable across platforms. Texters use it for cooking content of nearly every cuisine, since onions are in just about everything alongside garlic.

Sautéing, caramelizing, and onion-soup posts all pull it in. Beyond food, the onion has massive meme-and-metaphor weight: the "layers of an onion" metaphor for complex personalities (Shrek's famous "ogres are like onions" line), the "crying onion" trope for sad situations, and the satirical news site The Onion all give the emoji extra cultural baggage. Texters use it for tearjerker content, sad-but-funny captions, and Shrek references.

Tear-inducing chopping jokes show up constantly. Pickled-onion, French-onion-soup, and bloomin'-onion food posts all use it. Added to Unicode 12.0 in 2019, the onion has been doing kitchen-and-Shrek double duty ever since.