Raising Hands

🙌 Raising Hands is one of the two-handed gestures in Unicode's People & Body group. Typical contexts are celebration, gesture, hand and hands. Unicode also files it under hooray, praise, raised and raising, which shows how widely it is read.

You can drop 🙌 into chats, social posts, headlines or a bio. On SmileyZone it is filed under Gestures and Hands. It joined the standard with Emoji 0.6 in 2010, so support on current devices is reliable. Its code point is U+1F64C. The emoji also comes in 5 skin tone variants, listed in the sidebar.

• 🙌 works as a one-character reply when celebration is the subject.
• Fits messages about celebration, gesture, hand and hands.
• Often seen near 👏🏻 Clapping Hands: Light Skin Tone, 🙌🏻 Raising Hands: Light Skin Tone and 👏 Clapping Hands.

Two raised hands mean cheering or relief in Western chat. Unicode calls them “person raising both hands in celebration”, but the visual ancestor is the orans prayer posture found in Judaism, Christianity and Islam – hands lifted to receive a blessing.

In evangelical and Pentecostal settings that exact posture is still common, so the emoji is read religiously there.

• 🙌👐 – Raising Hands and Open Hands
• 🙌👏 – Raising Hands with Clapping Hands
• 🙌🤝 – Raising Hands plus Handshake
• 🙌🙏 – Raising Hands and Folded Hands
• 🙌🤲 – Raising Hands with Palms up Together
• 🙌🫶 – Raising Hands plus Heart Hands

Easy to mix up with 👏🏻 Clapping Hands: Light Skin Tone, 🙌🏻 Raising Hands: Light Skin Tone or 👏 Clapping Hands. They sit in the same Unicode subgroup and look similar at small sizes, so it is worth checking the name before sending.