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.

So we reach for an emoji that’s pregnant with that metaphor: the skull. Fully 92 percent of all people online use emoji now, and one-third of them do so daily.

Mr. Broni pointed out how both the skull emoji and the chair emoji have been used to connote laughter. (The skull emoji means, “I’m dead,” while the chair emoji was a TikTok in-joke.) ...