Hand Emoji Copy and Paste: All 57, Sorted by What You Mean

There are 57 hand and gesture emoji in the standard set, and the picker orders them in a way that helps nobody. 👍 sits nowhere near 👎. The pointing fingers are scattered. Finding the one you want means scrolling past thirty you do not.

Below they are grouped by what you are actually trying to communicate. Tap any to copy.

Approval and agreement

• 👍 thumbs up
• 👌 OK hand
• 👏 clapping hands
• 🙌 raising hands
• 🤝 handshake
• 🤜 🤛fist bump, facing right and leftCopy
• ✌️ victory hand

A warning about 👍 that catches people out in writing. In a short reply it has drifted towards curtness, particularly among younger users, where a bare thumbs up to a long message reads as dismissal rather than agreement. It is still neutral in a work channel and still the default reaction everywhere, but as a standalone reply to a friend it carries more edge than it used to. We traced that shift in how the generations read emoji differently.

Disagreement and refusal

• 👎 thumbs down
• ✋ raised hand
• 🤚 raised back of hand
• 🖐️ hand with fingers splayed
• 🚫 prohibited, for when a hand is not emphatic enough

Pointing and directing attention

• 👈 👉pointing left and rightCopy
• 👆 👇pointing up and downCopy
• ☝️ index pointing up, the older thinner one
• 👋 waving hand

👇 and 👆 do a specific job on social media: they point at the thing above or below the caption. That only works when you know how the post will be laid out, and it is the most common reason a caption reads oddly when a platform reflows it.

Please, thanks and hoping

• 🙏 folded hands
• 🤲 palms up together
• 🤞 crossed fingers
• 👐 open hands

🙏 is the most argued about emoji on this list. It is officially folded hands, it is widely read as prayer, and a persistent belief holds that it is a high five. It is not a high five, and it never was. The design came from a Japanese gesture of thanks and apology, which is why it reads as please and thank you to a great many people and as prayer to a great many others. Both readings are now correct in practice. Our full breakdown is in the hand emoji meanings guide.

Strength, threat and celebration

• 💪 flexed biceps
• ✊ raised fist
• 👊 oncoming fist
• 🤘 sign of the horns
• 🤟 love you gesture
• 🤙 call me hand
• 🖖 vulcan salute

🤘 and 🤟 are constantly confused and mean different things. The horns has the index and little finger up and is a rock music gesture. The love you gesture adds the thumb and comes from American Sign Language. Sending the first when you meant the second is a common and mostly harmless mistake, though it does change a sincere message into a heavy metal one.

Writing, grooming and small gestures

• ✍️ writing hand
• 💅 nail polish
• 🤏 pinched fingers
• 🤌 pinching hand
• 🤝 handshake again, which doubles as agreement

🤏 pinched fingers arrived in 2020 and became an Italian gesture meme almost immediately, which is unusual for an emoji that was proposed as a neutral hand shape. 🤌 pinching hand, added the year before, means something small and is the one people actually want when they are describing a tiny amount.

People doing things with hands

• 🙋 person raising hand, plus 🙋‍♂️ and 🙋‍♀️
• 🤦 person facepalming, plus the gendered variants
• 💁 person tipping hand
• 👫 👬 👭people holding handsCopy
• 🫱 🫲rightwards and leftwards hand, added for handshake sequencesCopy

Everything in this group is a joined sequence rather than a single character, which matters for reliability. More on that below.

🫱 and 🫲 are the newest additions here and the least understood. They were encoded specifically so that a handshake could be built from two people with different skin tones, something the single 🤝 glyph could never express. Used on their own they look like a hand reaching in from the side of the frame, which is not what most people intend.

The gestures that are rude somewhere else

This is the section worth reading before using any of these with people abroad.

• 👌 OK hand. Offensive in Brazil and parts of the Middle East, where it is a crude insult rather than approval. It also acquired a separate and contested association with extremist signalling in the United States from around 2017, which was originally a hoax but has stuck in some contexts.
• 👍 thumbs up. Rude in parts of the Middle East and West Africa, with roughly the meaning of a raised middle finger.
• ✌️ victory hand. With the palm facing inward, this is a serious insult in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. The emoji is drawn palm outward, so it is usually safe, but the distinction is real and some vendor artwork is ambiguous.
• 🤘 sign of the horns. In Italy, Spain and parts of South America this implies the recipient's partner is unfaithful.
• 🖕 middle finger. Universally understood, and worth knowing that it is one of the few emoji some corporate systems filter outright.

None of this means avoid them. It means knowing that a thumbs up is not globally neutral, which is worth a moment's thought before sending one to a new client abroad. More of these mismatches are in our emoji etiquette guide.

The two pointing fingers nobody can tell apart

👆 backhand index pointing up and ☝️ index pointing up are different emoji and they behave differently.

☝️ is the older of the two, a thin monochrome character that predates the modern set, and it needs a hidden selector attached before a font will draw it in colour. Without that selector it arrives as a flat outline. 👆 is from the 2010 wave, always renders in full colour, and shows the back of the hand rather than a lone finger.

For captions pointing at something above the text, 👆 is the safer choice every time. ☝️ is better when you want the schoolteacher register, the raised finger of someone about to make a point, which is a genuinely different tone.

Hands in sequences, which inflates the count

The reason this category has 57 entries rather than twenty is that many gestures exist in several forms at once.

Take 🙋 person raising hand. There is the neutral version, a man version and a woman version, with the gendered pair assembled from the neutral character plus a gender marker held on by an invisible connector. The same pattern repeats for facepalming, tipping hand and shrugging, which is where a large share of the count comes from.

Each of those can also take a skin tone, so a single gesture can exist in eighteen distinct encoded forms. That is why the picker feels so crowded, and why a seemingly simple message can carry far more characters than it appears to.

It is also the main reason hand emoji fail to render. A single character almost always works. A character joined to a gender sign and carrying a skin tone has three separate things that can be dropped in transit, and any one of them produces a visible mess at the other end.

Which ones break on older phones

Hand emoji are unusually prone to rendering problems for two reasons.

The gendered ones are built from several characters. 🙋‍♀️ is a person, an invisible joiner and a gender sign. A client lacking support draws a person followed by a stray symbol, which looks like a mistake rather than a gesture.

Several are recent. 🫱 and 🫲 arrived in 2022, 🤏 in 2020, 🤌 in 2019. A handset running an emoji font from a few releases back draws empty boxes for these instead of the gesture. If a message has to work everywhere, the safe core is 👍 👎 ✌️ 👌 👏 🙏 💪 ✋, all of which date from 2010 or earlier.

Hands are also the group most affected by skin tone modifiers, since nearly every one of them accepts a tone. That doubles the character count and adds another thing that can be stripped in transit, which we covered in the skin tone guide.

The ones people look for and cannot find

A few gestures get searched for constantly and do not exist as emoji at all.

• A high five. There is no high five emoji. 🙌 raising hands is the usual substitute and 🙏 is frequently misread as one, but neither depicts it. Two people would need to be in the frame, and no such glyph was ever encoded.
• A fist bump between two people. 🤜 and 🤛 are two halves facing opposite directions, intended to be typed together as 🤜🤛. Used alone each one looks like a sideways punch.
• A finger gun, a thumbs sideways, or a hand on a chin. None exist. Emoji 18.0, approved in September 2026, does add leftwards and rightwards thumb signs, but no platform has shipped artwork for them yet.
• A salute. 🫡 saluting face is a face rather than a hand, which is why hand searches never surface it.

Requests for new gestures go through a formal Unicode proposal process that takes about two years from submission to a phone, and most are rejected. The pipeline for what is coming is on our new emoji page.

Picking the right one for a reaction

A short decision list for the most common case.

• Acknowledging something without opinion: 👍 in a work context, 👀 among friends, since the thumbs up now reads cold in casual chat.
• Genuine praise: 👏 for effort, 🔥 for the result. The two are not interchangeable.
• Thanks: 🙏, which carries it better than any worded reply of similar length.
• Agreeing to a plan: 🤝, which implies commitment where 👍 implies receipt.
• Wishing someone luck: 🤞, covered in more depth in our crossed fingers explainer.
• Asking for something: 🤲, which reads as a request rather than the gratitude 🙏 implies.
• Signalling you are present: 👋, the one gesture that works as both a greeting and a goodbye without ambiguity.

Copying the whole set at once

If you want all 57 in one block for a document or a cheat sheet, the hand emoji page has them in a grid you can copy individually, and the full gesture set with platform comparison images sits under people and body.

Individual pages for the most used gestures carry platform by platform artwork, so you can see how 👍 differs between vendors before committing to it: thumbs up, folded hands and clapping hands are the three most looked up. The wider set of approving and celebratory glyphs sits on the clap emoji page.

For the typographic versions, which are a different thing entirely, our hand symbols collection has pointing fingers and manicules that are text characters rather than emoji. Those survive in usernames and spreadsheets where emoji get filtered out, and they render in a single colour, which suits documents better than a yellow cartoon hand.