England Flag Emoji 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 (St George’s Cross)

Why the England flag emoji shows as a black flag

Most flag emoji are just two letters. The England flag is different: it is a waving black flag 🏴 (U+1F3F4) followed by six invisible tag characters that spell gbeng, the ISO 3166-2 code for England, plus an end tag. A phone that knows the sequence draws St George’s Cross. A system that doesn’t know it skips the hidden tags and shows only the black flag.

That is exactly what happens on Windows. Its built-in emoji font has no flag emoji, so Chrome and Edge on a Windows PC show a black flag or nothing useful. Firefox ships its own emoji font and usually gets it right. Very old Android phones (from before 2018) can also fall back to the black flag. The text you copied is not broken: send it to someone on a current iPhone or Android phone and they will see the red cross.

England vs the UK flag: which one to use

England has no two-letter country code of its own, so there is no “EN” flag. 🇬🇧 is the flag of the whole United Kingdom, the Union Jack, which combines the crosses of St George (England), St Andrew (Scotland) and St Patrick (Ireland). Use 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 for England football and rugby teams, St George’s Day (23 April) and anything only about England. Use 🇬🇧 for Team GB, British passports or the UK as a whole.

If you are not sure the person you are messaging has a modern phone, “Copy with name” above pastes 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 England, which still reads correctly when the flag falls back to black.

How to type it in Discord, Slack and WhatsApp

• Discord: type :england: in the message box and pick the flag from the list.
• Slack: the shortcode is :flag-england:.
• WhatsApp and iPhone: open the emoji keyboard and search “England”, or just paste from this page. WhatsApp Web uses its own emoji images, so the flag usually shows properly there even on Windows.
• Gboard on Android: search “England” in the emoji panel. If nothing comes up, your keyboard is out of date; paste it from here instead.

For developers: why the length looks wrong

The England flag is 7 code points. In JavaScript "🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿".length is 14, because every one of those code points needs two UTF-16 units, and in UTF-8 it takes 28 bytes. A MySQL column that is utf8 instead of utf8mb4 will mangle it. If you build it from HTML entities you need all seven, and dropping even one leaves a black flag. The full set of codes is in the table below.

Are there other UK nation flags?

Unicode recommends exactly three subdivision flags: England, Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 and Wales 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿. There is no Northern Ireland, Cornwall or Yorkshire emoji. A tag sequence for Northern Ireland can be typed in theory, but no major phone draws it, and Northern Ireland has had no official flag of its own since 1972.

England flag emoji codes

England flag emoji FAQ

Why does the England flag emoji show as a black flag?

Because the England flag is a black flag emoji followed by hidden tag letters that spell gbeng. Devices that don’t support the sequence, such as Windows and some very old Android phones, ignore the tags and show only the black flag. The full emoji is still there, and people on current iPhones and Android phones see the St George’s Cross.

Is there a Northern Ireland flag emoji?

No. Unicode only recommends three UK nation flags: England, Scotland and Wales. Use the UK flag 🇬🇧 for Northern Ireland, or the Ireland flag 🇮🇪 for all-Ireland teams such as Irish rugby.

What is the code for the England flag emoji?

It is seven code points: U+1F3F4 U+E0067 U+E0062 U+E0065 U+E006E U+E0067 U+E007F. On Discord and GitHub the shortcode is :england:, and on Slack it is :flag-england:.

Should I use 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 or 🇬🇧 for England?

Use 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 for England only, for example the England football team or St George’s Day. Use 🇬🇧 for the whole United Kingdom, Team GB or anything British in general.

More flags: copy any of 270 flag emoji in the multi-flag copy picker, test yourself with the Guess the Flag quiz, or print classroom flags from our free printable world flags.