Lunar New Year Emojis 2027: Goat, Sheep or Ram?

The best Lunar New Year emojis for 2027 are 🧧 🏮 🧨 🍊 plus the animal of the year, and that animal is the problem. Lunar New Year falls on Saturday 6 February 2027, starting a Fire Goat year, but the Chinese sign 羊 (yáng) can mean goat, sheep or ram. Emoji gives you all three: 🐐, 🐑 and 🐏. Here is which one to pick, and why your aunt in Seoul might pick differently from your cousin in Hanoi.

Why one zodiac sign has three emoji

The eighth sign of the Chinese zodiac is written 羊. On its own the character does not separate the animals the way English does. Chinese adds a prefix when it needs to: 山羊 (shānyáng, literally "mountain yáng") is a goat, 绵羊 (miányáng, "cotton yáng") is a sheep, and 公羊 (gōngyáng) is a male of either, which English would usually call a ram.

The zodiac never adds the prefix. So when the year has to be translated, someone has to choose, and English speakers have been arguing about it for at least a decade.

Emoji happens to mirror the split exactly. Our Unicode catalog lists three separate characters:

• 🐑 ewe, a female sheep. Emoji 0.6, one of the Japanese carrier glyphs that joined Unicode 6.0 in 2010.
• 🐏 ram, a horned male sheep, its horns coiled into spirals. Emoji 1.0, 2015.
• 🐐 goat, with the straight swept-back horns and the beard. Emoji 1.0, 2015.

Note the official name of 🐑. It is "ewe", not "sheep", which surprises most people who assume the fluffy one is the generic animal. It is simply the oldest of the three.

The 2015 "sheep or goat" fight, briefly

The last time this sign came round with a Western news cycle attached was February 2015, and English-language outlets turned it into a story. NPR ran a piece by Hansi Lo Wang in February 2015 on the ambiguity, quoting a Chinese-language professor at the U.S. Naval Academy who said he did not think there was a wrong translation. The Christian Science Monitor covered the same question on 19 February 2015.

The more interesting voice came from China itself. An AFP report carried by the Jordan Times that month quoted Xinhua saying few ordinary Chinese were troubled by the distinction at all. Some scholars quoted in the same coverage leaned towards goat, arguing goats were the more commonly kept animal historically.

Our read: the debate is mostly an English-language problem. Inside Chinese, 羊 is just 羊.

Which one should you use? A decision guide

There is no wrong answer, but there are better and worse fits depending on who is reading. This is how we would choose.

• Writing in English to a general audience: 🐐. "Year of the Goat" is the phrasing used by most of the 2027 date guides we checked, the Farmer's Almanac among them, and 🐐 is the clearest drawing at small sizes. It also matches our own search data (see below).
• Writing to Korean friends or family: 🐑. The sign is usually rendered as sheep (양) in Korean usage, so the woolly glyph reads more naturally. We could not find an authoritative Korean source to cite on this, so treat it as common usage rather than rule.
• Writing in Vietnamese for Tết: 🐐. The Vietnamese sign Mùi is generally rendered as goat (con dê).
• Writing in Japanese: 🐑. The sign 未 is read hitsuji, which Japanese dictionaries gloss first as sheep.
• Designing something festive and cute: 🐑. It is the softest drawing on every major platform, and it pairs better with 🧧 and 🌸 than a goat's beard does.
• Not sure, mixed group chat: send 🐐🐑 together. It reads as a small joke about the ambiguity, which is exactly what it is.

The one we would avoid as the default is 🐏. A ram is technically a valid reading of 羊, but the curled horns make most people think of Aries, the Western star sign ♈, rather than the Chinese year. Our guide to the Western zodiac symbols covers that one.

What our Search Console data says

This part only we can tell you. In Google Search Console, the bare query "🐐" (just the glyph, nothing else) logged 91 impressions for bestemojis.com at an average position of about 9. A handful of queries for "🧧" on its own also show up. People paste the bare glyph into Google, hoping to learn its name and origin.

That tells us two things. First, 🐐 is the version people actually reach for, so it is the safe pick for English. Second, a lot of people seeing 🧧 in a message do not know what it is. If you send it to someone outside the tradition, a short "lucky red envelope" alongside it is kind.

Part of that 🐐 traffic will also be the other meaning of the goat, "greatest of all time". Expect a sports fan or two to misread your New Year message as praise.

All 12 zodiac animals as emoji, with their next years

Several signs have two emoji, a face and a full body. Either works; the full-body glyph usually looks more like zodiac artwork, the face looks friendlier. Lunar years start in late January or February, so someone born in January usually belongs to the previous year's animal.

1. Rat: 🐀 or 🐭. Next: 2032.
2. Ox: 🐂. Next: 2033. Avoid 🐄, which is a dairy cow, not an ox.
3. Tiger: 🐅 or 🐯. Next: 2034.
4. Rabbit: 🐇 or 🐰. Next: 2035.
5. Dragon: 🐉 or 🐲. Next: 2036.
6. Snake: 🐍. Next: 2037.
7. Horse: 🐎 or 🐴. Next: 2038. (2026 was a horse year.)
8. Goat: 🐐, 🐑 or 🐏. Now: 2027.
9. Monkey: 🐒 or 🐵. Next: 2028.
10. Rooster: 🐓. Next: 2029. 🐔 is a generic chicken; 🐓 is the one with the comb and tail.
11. Dog: 🐕 or 🐶. Next: 2030.
12. Pig: 🐖 or 🐷. Next: 2031.

The full-body animals are mostly the newer glyphs. 🐀 🐂 🐅 🐇 🐉 🐓 🐖 are all Emoji 1.0 (2015) in our catalog, while the faces 🐭 🐯 🐰 🐲 🐷 date to 2010. 🐕 is Emoji 0.7, from Unicode 7.0 in 2014. If you care about older phones, the faces are the more compatible choice. For the stories behind each animal glyph, our animal emoji meanings guide goes further, and our piece on why near-identical emoji exist explains how pairs like 🐲 and 🐉 ended up side by side.

Tết and Seollal change the animals

Lunar New Year is not only Chinese New Year. In Vietnam it is Tết, and in Korea it is Seollal, and the emoji set shifts with each.

Vietnam swaps two signs. The rabbit becomes the cat, and the ox becomes the water buffalo. The South China Morning Post covered the cat year in January 2023 (Tết Quý Mão). The most common explanation is phonetic: the zodiac branch 卯 is read Mão in Vietnamese, which sounds close to mèo, the word for cat. No one has pinned down when the switch happened, and older Vietnamese texts do mention the rabbit.

So for Vietnamese friends, the sign list reads 🐈 or 🐱 for the fourth animal and 🐃 for the second. 🐃 is the water buffalo, Emoji 1.0, and it is the correct pick for a Vietnamese buffalo year, not 🐂. The next Vietnamese cat year is 2035.

Korea keeps the Chinese animals but its own customs. Instead of red envelopes, Korean New Year money is traditionally handed over in embroidered silk pouches called bokjumeoni (복주머니). There is no emoji for those; 👛 is the nearest stand-in, and honestly not very near.

The festival kit, glyph by glyph

Here is what each of the core festival emoji actually depicts, with the version from our catalog. Versions matter because the newest ones still show as blank boxes on very old phones.

• 🧧 red envelope: Emoji 11.0, 2018. The hongbao (Mandarin), lai see (Cantonese) or lì xì (Vietnamese), filled with money and given to children and unmarried relatives. WeChat launched digital red envelopes during the 2014 holiday, which is part of why this glyph gets so much use in chats.
• 🧨 firecracker: Emoji 11.0, 2018. Folklore says the noise scares off Nian, a monster that came at the turn of the year.
• 🏮 red paper lantern: Emoji 0.6, 2010. The 15th day of the festival is the Lantern Festival, which in 2027 lands on 20 February.
• 🍊 tangerine: Emoji 0.6, 2010. Mandarin oranges are given as gifts because the name echoes the word for good fortune; in Cantonese, 桔 (gat) and 吉 (gat) are near-homophones.
• 🥟 dumpling: Emoji 5.0, 2017. Families in northern China traditionally make jiaozi on New Year's Eve, folded into a shape said to resemble old silver ingots.
• 🐉 dragon (Emoji 1.0, 2015) and 🐲 dragon face (Emoji 0.6, 2010): the dragon dance and lion dance are fixtures of the parades, even outside a dragon year.

One glyph to leave out: 🥮 moon cake (Emoji 11.0, 2018). It is a Mid-Autumn Festival food, eaten in September or October, not at New Year. Sending it in February is like sending 🎃 at Christmas. People do it often enough that it is worth flagging.

Greetings set: characters, pronunciation, emoji

We built this set by hand, and it is the bit we expect people to copy. Each line pairs the written greeting with its pronunciation and an emoji string that suits it. Simplified characters are used for mainland China and Singapore; traditional forms are given where Cantonese speakers would normally write them.

• 新年快乐(xīnnián kuàilè), Happy New Year: 🧧🏮✨Copy
• 恭喜发财(gōngxǐ fācái), Wishing you prosperity: 🧧💰🍊Copy
• 恭喜發財 (Cantonese gung hei fat choi), the same greeting in traditional characters: 🧧🍊🧨
• 羊年大吉 (yáng nián dà jí), Great luck in the Year of the Goat: 🐐🧧🏮
• 三羊开泰(sān yáng kāi tài), three goats bring good fortune: 🐐🐐🐐✨Copy
• 万事如意(wànshì rúyì), May everything go as you wish: 🍊🏮🙌Copy
• 身体健康(shēntǐ jiànkāng), Good health: 🍵🥟💪Copy
• Chúc Mừng Năm Mới, Happy New Year in Vietnamese: 🧧🌸🐐
• 새해 복 많이 받으세요 (saehae bok mani badeuseyo), Korean, roughly "receive many blessings in the new year": 🐑🙇✨

三羊开泰 is the clever one for 2027. It is a pun on 三阳开泰, a phrase from the Yijing about three yang lines, meaning spring returning and fortunes improving. Because 羊 and 阳 are both pronounced yáng, goat years turn it into three animals, and Chinese New Year artwork often paints exactly that. Three 🐐 in a row is a recognised cultural reference, so it reads as more than enthusiasm to anyone who knows the pun.

For more ready-made strings, our Chinese New Year emoji combos are sorted by mood, and if you want decorative characters such as 福 or 囍 beyond emoji, the Chinese symbols set has them.

When your 🧧 shows up as a box

🧧 and 🧨 arrived in 2018, which means a phone that has not had an OS update since then cannot draw them. You will most often hit this with a grandparent's old Android tablet, which is, of course, exactly who you are sending red envelope emoji to.

If you are not sure, lead with the 2010 glyphs, which every phone in use can draw: 🏮 🍊 🐑 🎆. Then add 🧧 as a bonus. The fix for emoji showing as a box walks through what to do when one breaks.

Dates for 2027 and the next few years

Lunar New Year 2027 begins on Saturday 6 February. It starts a Fire Goat year (丁未, dīngwèi in the sexagenary cycle), which runs until Lunar New Year 2028 on 26 January, the start of the Year of the Monkey. The Lantern Festival closes the 2027 celebrations on 20 February.

The festival is a public holiday in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea and Vietnam, though the number of days off varies by country. Our holiday countdown page tracks the date live, and the Lunar New Year emoji hub collects the full themed set. If you are planning the whole year's messages, our emoji calendar for every occasion lists the moving festivals side by side.

A last practical note. If you post a Year of the Goat graphic and someone replies "it's a sheep, actually", you now know they are not wrong. Neither are you.