Day 10, and we are at the end of this year’s Shady Characters advent calendar! Today, to answer, belatedly, a question asked by Larry Hosken, we’re looking at PERSON WITH FOLDED HANDS (🙏).
Per John Kelly at Emojipedia, and in common with some of the other emoji we’ve seen in this series, PERSON WITH FOLDED HANDS looks a little different now to its original form. It was one of the earliest emoji to make it out of Japan, when Apple made it available on the iPhone in 2008, but even then it was unclear how best to draw it. One school, headed by Japanese mobile operator Softbank, held that the emoji should show two hands pressed together in the same way as today’s version. The other, led by Softbank’s competitor KDDI AU, showed a person, not just a pair of hands, with their head bowed in thought or prayer and their hands pressed or clasped in front.1 Both versions persisted for some time, with the latter finally dying out between 2015 and 2017.2
It was around the same time, too, that the meaning of PERSON WITH FOLDED HANDS seemed to change. Before then, ‘🙏’ had been used mostly as a gesture of prayer, praise or gratitude. Then, in 2014, it became fair game to use it as a high-five gesture instead.3,4 It seems plain enough where this new interpretation came from — after all, ‘🙏’ isn’t an unreasonable depiction of a high-five — and it is a sign of emoji’s flexibility that PERSON WITH FOLDED HANDS can sustain two such different meanings.1 (Neither of which, it should be noted, have anything much to do with the emoji’s formal name.)
Before we wrap up this year’s advent calendar, I want to use ‘🙏’ in its original sense: I want to thank you, the readers of the Shady Characters blog, for coming back year after year and for buying the books I’ve been lucky enough to be able to write.
2025 has been a challenging year, not least because my day job at Blackford Analysis came within a hair’s breadth of being made redundant in October. Many of my colleagues — friends, really — were not so lucky, which is why it’s gratifying to see that many of them have since landed new jobs elsewhere. And it’s why it was doubly pleasing to be able to catch up with so many of them, as you can see below, at the launch of Face with Tears of Joy at my local bookshop, Far From the Madding Crowd. If for no other reason than that, ‘🙏’ seems like the perfect emoji with which to wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.
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Kelly, John M. “What Does The 🙏 Folded Hands Emoji Mean?”. Emojipedia (blog).
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Emojipedia. “🙏 Folded Hands Emoji”. Accessed December 18, 2025.
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VIDEO: Controversy Brews over Emoji. 6abc Philadelphia, 2014.
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D’Onfro, Jillian. “The ’prayer hands’ emoji changed in the latest iPhone update and people are freaking out”. Business Insider.