🦠 Microbe

Emoji Meaning

A microbe, as a bacterium grown in a 🧫 Petri Dish or observed under a 🔬 Microscope. Generally depicted as a squiggly, single-celled microorganism with prominent cilia. Color, shape, and position vary across platforms. Commonly used to represent bacteria, viruses, and germs and disease more generally.

In 2020, this emoji became primarily used in reference to Coronavirus / COVID-19.

Apple's version of this emoji most closely represents a virus, while others from Samsung and Twitter’s appear as bright green bacteria. Other versions of this emoji also appear mainly as bacteria: Microsoft’s is blue, Facebook’s indigo, and WhatsApp’s purple. Google’s design previously displayed five microbes in different, bright colors.

Microbe was approved as part of Unicode 11.0 in 2018 and added to Emoji 11.0 in 2018.