A SKULL immediately makes people think of death. However, when it comes to emojis there is always more to the story than meets the eye. What does the skull emoji mean? The main meaning of the skull… ...

QUICK ANSWER. The skull emoji 💀 typically symbolizes extreme emotions, such as dying of laughter or exhaustion, expressing awkwardness or embarrassment, in a hyperbolic and playful manner.

Last night my 21-year-old daughter, who goes to college in another state, texted me a skull 💀 emoji followed by a crying emoji 😭. It was a strange response to a photo I sent earlier that day.

The skull emoji, too, is already becoming overused. In the sentence I just wrote a Washington Post op-ed on Gen Z slang 💀, I’m not using the emoji to cue laughter, as I once might have.

The skull emoji is often used in text to humorously convey the phrase ‘I’m dead’ to describe if users find something hilarious, but it can also mean the feeling of tiredness.

An Irish emoji expert has predicted the most-used ones for 2025 and says the laughing face is “the millennial go-to” and is being swapped for the skull emoji by Gen-Z. Dubliner Keith Broni, 35 ...