Pinching Hand Emoji

Submission 22,372

Part of a series on Emoji. [View Related Entries]

About

Pinching Hand Emoji ideogram depicting one hand bringing the index finger and thumb in close proximity. While the emoji was devised to express the gesture for a "small amount," online, many joked that the emoji describes the size of one's phallus.

Origin

On February 5th, 2019, Emojipedia announced that there would 230 new emoji "coming to phones in 2019." Among those included, the "Pinching Hand" was approved. @Emojipedia tweeted an image of the emoji and received more than 3,600 retweets and 12,000 likes (shown below).^[1]

According to Emojipedia,^[2] "A hand with thumb and index finger in close proximity. Used to suggest that something is small, or to gesture a small amount. Pinching Hand was approved as part of Unicode 12.0 in 2019 and added to Emoji 12.0 in 2019."

Spread

Following the tweet, many joked that the emoji would be used to describe the length of one's penis. That day, Twitter^[3] user @kathbarbadoro tweeted, "FINALLY a small dick emoji." The tweet received more than 3,000 retweets and 12,000 likes in 24 hours (shown below, left). Others made similar jokes about the emoji being used to criticize a penis (example below, center).

That day, Twitter^[4] user @NeptxneDubz tweeted, "Unsolicited dick pic community is in a panic rn." Within 24 hours, the tweet received more than 61,000 retweets and 250,000 likes (shown below, right).

Several media outlets reported on the emoji, including Mashable, ^[5] PopBuzz,^[6] BuzzFeed ^[7] and more.

#NotOK

On February 8th, 2019, a 4chan user submitted a thread titled "#NotOK to Pinch" to the /pol/ board on 4chan,^[8] which contained various photoshopping images calling for viewers to turn the emoji into a hate symbol (shown below).

That day, the hashtag "#NotOK" appeared on Twitter with images from the 4chan thread, some of which accused the emoji of representing "picking cotton" (shown below).