Slithering Into The Year Of The Snake

We’re officially shedding the old and sinking our fangs into the Year of the Snake, which is why you might have seen the snake emoji surging in usage lately.

David Doochin

• 4 min read
Slithering Into The Year Of The Snake

We’re officially shedding the old and sinking our fangs into the Year of the Snake, which is why you might have seen the 🐍 Snake emoji surging in usage lately.

(And no, that doesn’t mean Taylor Swift is releasing Taylor’s Version of her album Reputation or seeking to rehash her nearly decade-old venomous, snake-emoji-focused feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian.)

Rather, January 29 marks the start of the Chinese New Year, the annual celebration of the resetting of the lunisolar Chinese calendar. An animal of the Chinese zodiac represents each year of the 12-year cycle, and this year marks the departure of the Year of the Dragon and slithering in of the Year of the Snake.

@emojipediaofficial is this the year snakes enter their reputation era? 🤔🐍🧧 #chinesenewyear #yearofthesnake #snake #emoji #emojis #lunarnewyear #taylorswift ♬ original sound - Emojipedia

Read on to learn about the snake emoji, the rest of the Chinese zodiac animal emojis, and other Lunar New Year emojis and lore associated with the annual celebration.

🐍 The Snake Emoji

The 🐍 Snake takes a couple of different forms and variations depending on the vendor, but most of the time it’s depicted as a yellow-greenish coiled serpent facing left with a forked tongue. 

Above: various 🐍 Snake emoji designs used across vendors in January 2025.

Though many people associate snakes with all things sinister, deceptive, cunning, and sly, snakes in the Chinese zodiac are also linked to positive qualities like resilience, transformation, wisdom, elegance, charm, and adaptability.

So tripping over a snake emoji lurking on your social media feed or in a text from a loved one doesn’t have to spell trouble; it could be a sign of good fortune and change to come.

Outside of the Chinese zodiac, the snake is also associated with Ophiuchus the Serpent Bearer, often proposed as the 13th sign of the Western zodiac and associated with the ⛎Ophiuchus emoji. 

🐯 Other Chinese Zodiac Emojis

If you’re a bona fide emoji buff and annual Chinese New Year celebrant, you may already know that just like the snake, each of the other 11 animals in the Chinese zodiac has its own emoji—and that’s no coincidence. 

When Unicode standardized the first set of emojis in 2010 in its Unicode 6.0 release, the Consortium made a point of adding an emoji for each of the lunar calendar animal signs.

This filled in the gaps in the earliest emoji sets from Japan in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, which often featured cuter, more cartoonish faces for many of the 12 animals, but not all.

Above: Chinese zodiac emojis from the Softbank emoji set in the year 2000.

Additionally, emoji-like icon sets from recently rediscovered portable computer devices from the late '80s and early '90s also contained icons representative of the animals of the Chinese zodiac.

Above: Chinese zodiac emojis-like icons from the 1994's Sharp Zaurus PI-4000.

This is why most Chinese zodiac animals (almost all but the snake, coincidentally) have two emojis: the full-body version proposed and then made official by Unicode and the face-only version originating in the early Japanese sets.

The emojis for the animals of the Chinese zodiac in the order of the cycle (with some open to interpretation depending on the translation used or the specificity of the animal) are:

(Learn more about the mythology behind the sequence of the animals in the lunar calendar.)

It probably comes as no surprise that usage of particular animal emojis for each respective zodiac year spikes in that year, but that usage uptick doesn’t always necessarily happen around Chinese New Year. 

Instead, our research at Emojipedia has shown that Chinese zodiac animal emojis have historically seen much more activity around New Year’s Eve in the Gregorian Calendar (the calendar used throughout most of the Western world), at least on platforms like X (formerly Twitter).

Below is an example of this from January 2022, which kicked off the Year Of The Tiger.

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This is likely because these social media platforms are blocked in China and the demographics of users on these platforms. Usage trends may well vary across China-based platforms such as WeChat and Sina Weibo.

🧧 Other Chinese New Year Emojis

Of course, animal emojis aren’t the only ones used to celebrate the so-called Spring Festival.

Emojis representing the traditions, customs, lore, and cuisine associated with Chinese New Year and with China in general serve as go-to symbols of the annual festivities.

More so than any other emoji, including each year’s respective zodiac animal emoji, the 🧧Red Envelope—which symbolizes the well-known, traditional practice in Chinese and some other Asian cultures of giving money in a red, vertical envelope as a gift in times of celebration, especially the Lunar New Year—sees the most usage annually before and around the holiday.

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Other popular emojis for ringing in the Chinese New Year include:

Because the color red is heavily associated with China, red emojis are also typical choices:

Ringing in the Lunar New Year isn’t just for people in or from China or other Asian countries; it’s an annual celebration to which emojis can add some fun, fortune, and cultural flair for anyone around the world.