winking face with tongue Emoji

The winking face with tongue 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 Tongue within the Smileys & Emotion category, winking face with tongue is the 128th of 171 emoji How To Type Any Symbol lists in this category, and was introduced in Emoji version 0.6 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+1F61C.

💡 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.