🕴︎
Every now and again an emoji appears that makes the reader say “What is this? Why is it here? Who thought this was a good idea?” It is in the spirit of both asking and answering such questions that I give you ‘🕴️’, or PERSON IN SUIT LEVITATING.
The story of how ‘🕴️’ ended up in our smartphones will not be a novel one for readers who have been following this year’s Shady Characters advent calendar, although it is still worth telling. What may be less obvious is why an emoji of a levitating person in a business suit should exist in the first place.
Just as Unicode was created from a collection of older character sets, and just as emoji were adopted from Japan’s mobile phones1 and television sets,2 so other groups of characters are added to the Unicode standard from time to time. One of those sets, which debuted in 2014,3 came from a typeface called Webdings, which itself had been created by Microsoft all the way back in 1997.4 And Webdings, finally, was the birthplace of ‘🕴️’ — or rather, of ‘🕴︎’, because both Webdings and PERSON IN SUIT LEVITATING were artefacts of a monochrome, pre-emoji world.
A Microsoft web page explains the company’s rationale for commissioning a new dingbat font:
Webdings is ideal for enriching the appearance of a Web page. Because it’s a font, it can be installed on the user’s system, (or embedded in the document itself) is fully scaleable and quick to render. It’s a perfect way of including graphics on your site without making users wait for lots of graphic files to download.4
This is almost exactly the same logic that led Shigetaka Kurita, emoji’s one-time founding father, to mint his emoji as a font rather than as individual images.5 Webdings never took off in computer-based writing in the way emoji have done for smartphones, but it’s not a stretch to say that the two had a lot in common.
Webdings’s eclectic collection of symbols* was a mix of iconic and symbolic, generic and specific. There were play/pause symbols; globes, maps and animals; planes, train, and automobiles. And then there was this guy: ‘🕴︎’.
Webdings’ characters were drawn by Sue Lightfoot, Ian Patterson and Geraldine Wade of Monotype, the type foundry, and also by Vincent Connare of Microsoft itself. Connare, who had previously designed Comic Sans (yes, that Comic Sans), recounted for Newsweek in 2016 that a symbol labelled “jump” had caught his eye in Webdings’ list of prospective characters.
Connare connected some dots. He was a fan of lively, exuberant ska music, whose devotees often sported sharp suits, pencil ties and pork-pie hats, and Connare decided that “jump” would be best exemplified by a pogoing figure wearing those same clothes. He modelled his design on the logo of a record label called 2 Tone, which took the form of a louche, smiling figure clad in ska’s trademark uniform. 2 Tone, in turn, had based that logo on a 1965 photograph of a reggae musician named Peter Tosh. And so, not only does PERSON IN SUIT LEVITATING predate emoji, but it is one of the few — only? — emoji that can draw a line of descent back to a real person.6,7
No-one would argue that ‘🕴️’ has the reach of ‘😂’ or the usefulness of ‘✨’. Nor is it even clear what it means. Dasha Fayvinova of Bustle, who lays claim to the one (semi-)serious attempt to define the meaning of PERSON IN SUIT LEVITATING, places it on an extremely fuzzy spectrum which runs from “grumpy” to “fan of Quentin Tarantino’s opus, Pulp Fiction”.8 (Wisely, Emojipedia demurs on the matter.9) We are left, then, with one of the great emoji curiosities: a symbol that exists not because we need it, or because it serves some greater purpose, but mostly because it can.
- 1.
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Scherer, Markus, Mark Davis, Kat Momoi, Darick Tong, Yasuo Kida, and Peter Edberg. “L2/10-132:/Emoji/Symbols:/Background/Data”. Unicode Consortium, April 2010.
- 2.
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Suignard, Michel. “L2/08-077R2:/Japanese/TV/Symbols”. Unicode Consortium, March 11, 2008.
- 3.
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Unicode. “Unicode 7.0.0”.
- 4.
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Microsoft Typography. “Webdings font family”. Accessed November 18, 2025.
- 5.
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Mariko Kosaka Power of Emoji. Ffconf 2016. Brighton, 2016.
- 6.
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Veix, Joe. “The Secret Ska History of a Little-Used Emoji”. Newsweek.
- 7.
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2 Tone Records. “The 2 Tone Label”. Accessed November 21, 2025.
- 8.
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Fayvinova, Dasha. “What Does Man In Business Suit Levitating Emoji Mean?”. Bustle.
- 9.
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Emojipedia. “🕴️ Person in Suit Levitating Emoji”. Accessed November 21, 2025.