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Eggplant emoji

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The eggplant emoji as it appears on X.

The Eggplant emoji (🍆), also known in English, French and its Unicode name as Aubergine, is an emoji featuring a purple eggplant. Social media users have noted the emoji's phallic appearance and often use it as a euphemistic or suggestive icon during sexting conversations, to represent a penis. It is frequently paired and often contrasted with the peach emoji (🍑), representing the buttocks (or vulva).

Development and usage history

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The eggplant emoji was originally included in proprietary emoji sets from SoftBank Mobile and au by KDDI.[1] When Apple released the first iPhone in 2007, there was an emoji keyboard intended for Japanese users only,[2] which encoded them using SoftBank's Private Use Area scheme.[3] However, after iPhone users in the United States discovered that downloading Japanese apps allowed access to the keyboard, pressure grew to expand the availability of the emoji keyboard beyond Japan.[2]

As part of a set of characters sourced from SoftBank, au by KDDI, and NTT Docomo emoji sets, the eggplant emoji was approved as part of Unicode 6.0 in 2010 under the name "Aubergine".[4] In 2011, Apple made the emoji keyboard a standard iOS feature worldwide.[2] Global popularity of emojis then surged in the early to mid-2010s.[5] The eggplant emoji has been included in the Unicode Technical Standard for emoji (UTS #51) since its first edition (Emoji 1.0) in 2015.[4]

Character information
Preview 🍆
Unicode name AUBERGINE
Encodings decimal hex
Unicode 127814 U+1F346
UTF-8 240 159 141 134 F0 9F 8D 86
UTF-16 55356 57158 D83C DF46
GB 18030 148 57 182 56 94 39 B6 38
Numeric character reference 🍆 🍆
Shift JIS (au by KDDI)[6] 243 144 F3 90
Shift JIS (SoftBank 3G)[6] 249 234 F9 EA
7-bit JIS (au by KDDI)[1] 121 112 79 70
Emoji shortcode[7] :eggplant:
Google name (pre-Unicode)[8] EGGPLANT
CLDR text-to-speech name[9] eggplant
Google substitute string[8] [ナス]

Popularity on social media and cultural impact

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The "aubergine" or "eggplant" emoji is commonly used to represent a penis in sexting conversations.[10][11] This usage has been noted to be common, particularly in the United States,[12][13] as well as in Canada.[14] In line with the eggplant emoji's common usage in sexual contexts, Emojipedia noted that the emoji is popularly paired with the peach emoji (🍑), which is often used to represent buttocks[15] or female genitalia.[16]

The emoji was used as a reference to penis on Twitter as early as 2011.[10][17] By the mid-2010s, online magazine outlets wrote about how the emoji's usage in sexual contexts morphed society's connotations of the eggplant "from an innocuous vegetable to America's favorite shorthand for a throbbing cock."[14][18] Slate writer Amanda Hess stated that "the eggplant has risen to become America's dominant phallic fruit."[13] Writing for Cosmopolitan, Kathryn Lindsay stated that "this simple, previously neglected vegetable rocketed into stardom in a matter of years, thanks to our collective decision to deem it the universal symbol for dick."[18]

In 2018, Dictionary.com became the first major reference to add explanations for emojis,[16] although these explanations are only included on the editorial section of the website.[19]

The eggplant emoji has been referenced by popular culture numerous times. In 2017, Netflix won a bidding war to distribute a film titled The Eggplant Emoji.[20] The film was ultimately renamed The Package. In 2019, the cosmetics retailer Lush sold bath bombs resembling the eggplant emoji for Valentine's Day.[21] The company expanded their eggplant and peach emoji-themed product line the following year.[22]

Reception

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As early as 2013, online media outlets have commented on the eggplant emoji's resemblance to a penis, with Complex listing it as one of "10 emojis to send while sexting."[23]

In April 2015, Instagram released a feature allowing users to hashtag emojis.[24] Shortly after, the platform banned the hashtag "🍆", as well as any references to "eggplant" from its search function.[24][25] Later in 2019, Facebook and Instagram both banned using the eggplant or peach emojis alongside "sexual statements about being horny."[26]

In 2016, the eggplant emoji's widespread usage as sexual innuendo led the American Dialect Society to vote it as the "Most Notable Emoji" of 2015.[10][27]

References

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  1. ^ a b Scherer, Markus; Davis, Mark; Momoi, Kat; Tong, Darick; Kida, Yasuo; Edberg, Peter. "Emoji Symbols: Background Data—Background data for Proposal for Encoding Emoji Symbols" (PDF). UTC L2/10-132.
  2. ^ a b c Cocozza, Paula (November 17, 2015). "Crying with laughter: how we learned how to speak emoji". The Guardian. Archived from the original on May 6, 2019. Retrieved July 28, 2017.
  3. ^ Emojipedia. "Apple iPhone OS 2.2". Emojipedia.
  4. ^ a b "🍆 Eggplant". Emojipedia. Retrieved March 18, 2019.
  5. ^ "Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2015 is…". Oxford Dictionaries Blog. November 16, 2015. Archived from the original on July 10, 2017. Retrieved July 28, 2017.
  6. ^ a b Unicode Consortium. "Emoji Sources". Unicode Character Database.
  7. ^ JoyPixels. "Emoji Alpha Codes". Emoji Toolkit.
  8. ^ a b Android Open Source Project (2009). "GMoji Raw". Skia Emoji.
  9. ^ Unicode, Inc. "Annotations". Common Locale Data Repository.
  10. ^ a b c "Eggplant emoji". Dictionary.com. February 28, 2018. Retrieved March 17, 2019.
  11. ^ Godoy, Maria (April 10, 2015). "Cooking With Emoji: We're Taking Eggplant Back From The Bros". NPR. Retrieved March 18, 2019.
  12. ^ Bromwich, Jonah Engel (October 21, 2015). "How Emojis Find Their Way to Phones". The New York Times. Retrieved March 17, 2019.
  13. ^ a b Hess, Amanda (April 3, 2015). "Move Over, Banana". Slate. Retrieved March 18, 2019.
  14. ^ a b Hay, Mark (April 25, 2017). "We're Going to Ruin the Eggplant Emoji for You Now". Tonic. Vice Media. Retrieved March 18, 2019.
  15. ^ Kircher, Madison Malone (December 16, 2016). "Very Official Study Finds Peach Emoji Most Often Paired With Eggplant". Intelligencer. Retrieved March 18, 2019.
  16. ^ a b Nazim, Hafeezah (March 7, 2018). "It's Confirmed: The Eggplant Emoji Symbolizes A Penis". Nylon. Retrieved March 18, 2019.
  17. ^ Zimmer, Ben (May 2016). "Among the New Words". American Speech. 91 (2): 200–225. doi:10.1215/00031283-3633118. Retrieved December 21, 2021.
  18. ^ a b Lindsay, Kathryn (August 5, 2016). "17 Times the Eggplant Emoji Was Too Real". Cosmopolitan. Retrieved March 18, 2019.
  19. ^ Steinmetz, Katy (March 6, 2018). "A Major Dictionary Has Officially Added Emoji". Time. Retrieved December 21, 2021.
  20. ^ Kit, Borys (January 26, 2017). "Netflix Wins Bidding War for 'Eggplant Emoji' From Ben Stiller, 'Workaholics' Creators (Exclusive)". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved December 21, 2021.
  21. ^ Krause, Amanda (January 4, 2019). "Lush fans are losing it over a new Valentine's Day bath bomb that looks like the eggplant emoji". Insider. Retrieved December 21, 2021.
  22. ^ Bradford, Tayler (January 9, 2020). "Eggplant and peach-emoji bath products have arrived". New York Post. Retrieved December 22, 2021.
  23. ^ Gallagher, Brenden (May 10, 2013). "10 Emojis to Send While Sexting". Complex. Retrieved March 18, 2019.
  24. ^ a b Willett, Megan (July 6, 2015). "There's an easy way to hack Instagram's ban on the 'offensive' eggplant emoji hashtag". Business Insider. Retrieved March 18, 2019.
  25. ^ Goldman, David (April 29, 2015). "Instagram blocks 'offensive' eggplant emoji hashtag". CNN. Retrieved March 18, 2019.
  26. ^ Street, Mikelle (October 23, 2019). "Facebook and Instagram Are Censoring 'Horny' Emojis". Out. Retrieved December 21, 2021.
  27. ^ "2015 Word of the Year is singular "they"". American Dialect Society. January 8, 2016. Retrieved March 18, 2019.
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