🍊 tangerine Emoji — Meaning, Copy & Paste

What Does the tangerine Emoji 🍊 Mean?

Round, bright orange, and topped with a small green leaf and stem — the tangerine emoji depicts the small citrus fruit also widely read as a clementine, mandarin, or just plain orange. The vibrant orange color pops against any background and the silhouette is unmistakable. Texters use it for healthy-snack content, lunchbox photos, Vitamin C posts during cold season, and citrus-themed cocktail recipes.

It's also closely tied to Lunar New Year celebrations across East Asian cultures, where mandarin oranges symbolize good fortune, prosperity, and luck — gifting them around the holiday is a long-standing tradition, and the emoji shows up heavily in Lunar New Year posts each January or February. Marmalade, mimosa, and breakfast-juice content also pull it in. Some users use it interchangeably with the lemon or grapefruit, since dedicated emojis for those other citrus fruits weren't always available.

Added to Unicode 6.0 in 2010 as part of the original fruit set, the tangerine has stayed consistently popular. Its name varies by region but the visual reads universally as cheerful citrus.