👽 Alien Emoji

What the alien emoji means

The gray alien. Sci-fi, space discussions and feeling like an outsider.

Common ways people use it

• Sci-fi content
• Space
• Feeling different

The classic grey

Alien at U+1F47D is drawn as the archetypal grey - large black eyes, small mouth - across every vendor. There is a companion Alien Monster at U+1F47E, which is actually a Space Invaders-style pixel sprite and means video games far more often than extraterrestrials.

The two are frequently swapped. If you mean gaming, the monster is the one people read that way.

Uses

Beyond literal science fiction, the alien marks anything strange, otherworldly or inexplicable, and it is common in conspiracy-adjacent jokes.

In server design it anchors space and sci-fi themes, usually alongside the rocket and star emoji.

In server configuration

It anchors space and science-fiction server themes, prefixing channels and roles alongside the rocket and star.

In servers about gaming, the Alien Monster sprite is the better choice, since that is the one members read as a games marker.

Two different aliens

Alien and Alien Monster are separate characters with quite different meanings - the grey means extraterrestrial, the pixel sprite means video games.

Autocomplete returns both for the same search term, which is why the wrong one gets used so often.

Where the grey came from

The design every vendor uses - oversized head, huge black almond eyes, no nose - traces to a specific late-twentieth-century image of extraterrestrials that spread through film and television rather than to any earlier tradition.

Unicode encoded it in 6.0 from the Japanese carrier sets, where it already existed in that form. That is why it looks like a Western pop-culture alien despite arriving through a Japanese standard.

Its companion, Alien Monster, is much more clearly Japanese in origin: it is a Space Invaders sprite, and the arcade cabinet it came from is why the emoji means video games rather than aliens.

Technical details

Codepoint

U+1F47D

Character

👽

As a standard Unicode emoji rather than a Discord custom emoji, this renders anywhere text does and needs no server or Nitro. Each platform draws it with its own emoji font, so the artwork differs between Android, iOS, Windows and Mac while the character and its meaning stay identical.

Questions about the alien emoji