slightly smiling face Emoji

The slightly smiling face emoji is used to add emotional tone or reaction to a message — face and emotion emoji like this are consistently among the most-used emoji worldwide because they let a short message carry the nuance of tone of voice or facial expression that plain text lacks.

Category context: The Smileys & Emotion category covers facial expressions and emotional reactions — the most frequently used emoji group in everyday messaging, since a single face can convey tone that plain text often misses.

Cataloged under Face Smiling within the Smileys & Emotion category, slightly smiling face is the 122nd of 171 emoji How To Type Any Symbol lists in this category, and was introduced in Emoji version 1 of the Unicode Emoji Standard. Technically, it is represented by a single Unicode code point rather than a combined sequence, making it one of the simpler emoji to encode and display reliably across platforms. Its Unicode code point sequence is U+1F642.

💡 Good to know: Screen readers announce this emoji by its official Unicode short name, which is worth checking if you're writing accessible content that relies on emoji for meaning.