🦐 shrimp Emoji — Meaning, Copy & Paste

What Does the shrimp Emoji 🦐 Mean?

Curled, pink, and ready for the grill — the shrimp emoji joined Unicode in 9.0 and is one of the most-used food-adjacent animal emojis. People use it for seafood content (shrimp scampi, shrimp tacos, shrimp on the barbie), sushi posts (ebi), and as slang for someone small ('lil shrimp') — sometimes affectionately, sometimes not. It's also become beloved in Asian-American food culture and TikTok cooking content, where shrimp is a star ingredient.

The cute curled design makes it land warmer than you'd expect from a crustacean. Pair with rice, lemon, or noodles for full food vibes, or use solo when you're hungry for shrimp. The 'shrimp colors' meme — about how shrimp can see way more colors than humans — pops up in popular science content.

Aquarists also have whole channels devoted to dwarf shrimp tanks using this emoji. Mantis shrimp content (with their incredible eyes and punching claws) is a popular educational genre on YouTube and TikTok using this emoji.