🍳 cooking Emoji — Meaning, Copy & Paste

What Does the cooking Emoji 🍳 Mean?

A bright yellow fried egg, sunny-side-up, sitting in a black frying pan with the bright yolk centered — the cooking emoji (officially named that, though most people just call it the frying-pan-egg emoji) is one of the most action-oriented food icons on the keyboard. Texters use it for breakfast content, brunch posts, sunny-side-up egg captions, and home-cooking photos. "Cooking dinner tonight" and "meal-prep Sunday" posts pull it in heavily as a general kitchen-activity icon.

Beyond food, the emoji has become a meme staple meaning "cooking up something" — when a TikToker, gamer, or content creator is making something good (a video, a play, a plan), commenters drop "he's cooking!" or "let her cook!" with this emoji. "Cook" as a slang verb for performing exceptionally well, especially in sports and gaming, gets heavy emoji use. Twitch streamers and rap-battle commentary use it constantly.

Added to Unicode 6.0 in 2010 originally as a literal frying-pan icon, this emoji's slang second life has totally eclipsed its breakfast origins on much of the internet.