Emojis That Start With Y: 🟑 Light Up Your Feed With This TikTok TrendΒ πŸ’›

Written by: Ortega
Published:

No matter how hard we try, there are questions in life we simply cannot find an answer to, such as when did time begin? Or when did the universe end? Some say that’s what makes life interesting; not knowing what each day will bring. For others, it’s what keeps them up at night. Strange and unusual fads popping up out of nowhere fall into this category. Most fads don’t last long; they often disappear just as quickly as they came. And because they come by so fast, most of the time, we don’t even know where they came from. We don’t even know why they are so popular! If you own a TV or a laptop, at least once in your life, you’ve followed a fad, whether that’s learning how to make Dalgona coffee or doing the Savage dance on TikTok! Speaking of fads, in the emoji market, we noticed a recent surge of interest in emojis that start with “Y”.

Two friends being recorded on TikTok, two women doing a dance on TikTok, emojis that start with y.

Photo from Adobe Stock

We initially assumed it was just another random Internet drama. Sometimes this happens when a social media influencer says or begins something, and their followers copy them. Remember when Gen Z began using the 🪑 Chair emoji? Many people on social media have been perplexed by this new meaning.

 

Sudden TikTok Trend

After doing some digging, we found out that the emojis that start with Y trend began as a game on TikTok! Users would ask their followers to guess their friend’s name. Easy peasy, right? The catch would be that the friend’s name would be written entirely in emoji, and at the start, beginning, or end of the word would be the letter Y, instead of an actual emoji.

Followers of the TikTok video would comment, saying that they have a hard time finding emojis that start with Y! The expression became so popular if you search for the phrase “emojis that start with Y on TikTok, you’ll see that the videos with content related to emojis that start with Y have already reached 56,500 views! Not bad for a trend that came out of nowhere.

Because we know how much you love emojis, we’ve put together our own list of emojis that start with Y. If you’re not into TikTok, or if you don’t like games, don’t move on to another article just yet. We’ve found other ways to use this trend.

For instance, you can use this technique to make your social media posts a little more decorative or to teach kids about emojis. We’ll talk more about that later.

For now, let’s dive in.

 

Yawning Face Emoji

Yawning Face Emoji

Are you in desperate need of sleep? Want to end a conversation without offending the person you are speaking with? Why not use the 🥱 yawning face emoji to communicate how you feel? Most of the time, this emoji is used in its literal sense, to show that you are super sleepy and can fall asleep at any time. This emoji shows a picture of a yellow face with raised, closed eyes. It’s got a hand over its mouth to show that it’s yawning.

However, if you’re up for the challenge, we also found a sassier way for you to use it. If someone’s been telling you about something you have zero interest in, when they ask for your opinion, respond with this emoji to shut them up. In addition, the yawning face may also be used to convey exhaustion or fatigue. Most users include it at the end of a chat about enduring a long day at work or in school.

Best Paired With: When combined with the 💤 ZZZ emoji or anything you find boring. Put the ​🎮 video game emoji before ​🥱 ​to say a game is boring, or 📺 television emoji and 🥱​ to say the same thing about a TV series.

 

Yellow Heart Emoji

Yellow Heart, Yellow Heart emoji, Heart emoji

Brighten someone’s day with the 💛 yellow heart emoji! This emoji features a heart that’s yellow. It symbolizes friendship, and can also show care, gratitude, appreciation, and warmth.

Whatever you do, don’t send your boyfriend or girlfriend a yellow heart, unless you want to just be friends with them. Yes, this emoji represents love, but it’s not a romantic type of love. It represents the love between friends or love between family members, which, of course, can often be just as important as romantic love! It’s a great heart to use for new friends and colleagues.

Woken up in a great mood and can’t wait to tell the world about it? The yellow heart is just what you need! Use this emoji to tell someone you’re truly grateful for having them in your life. It also goes well with those yearly Happy Mother’s Day, Happy Father’s Day, and Happy birthday texts, too!
On July 30th, International Friendship Day, be sure to shower this symbol all over your social media accounts! Meanwhile, on Snapchat, if a yellow heart appears beside a friend’s name, it means that you have sent this person the most photos, videos, and messages. Basically, the two of you are friendship goals.

Best Paired With: A ☀️ sun emoji to emphasize a friend’s sunny personality, or a 🤗 hugging face emoji after 💛 to show you love your friend so much that you are giving him or her a hug!

 

Yo-Yo Emoji

yo-yo emoji

Relive childhood memories with the 🪀 yo-yo emoji! This emoji shows an image of a yo-yo, one of the oldest toys in the world. It comprises two disks connected by a central axe wrapped in strings. The string makes the disks fall to the ground and come right back up.

Since yo-yos are nostalgic objects that frequently bring back pleasant recollections of earlier times, send the emoji to your childhood friends to remind them of the fun times you had together! You may also use the emoji to ask someone to watch a Yo-Yo game with you. If someone you know gets played (and by played we mean tricked), the emoji can highlight stories about their awful experience.

Best Paired With: The 🧃 beverage box emoji if you’ll be talking about your early years as a schoolboy or girl, or the 🏆 trophy emoji if you won a yo-yo game.

 

Yarn Emoji

Yarn emoji, Apple version of the Yarn emoji, arts emojis, emojis that start with y

Express your creativity through yarn and talk about your passion for knitting with the 🧶 yarn emoji! This emoji shows a ball of yarn, which is basically a long, continuous length of interlocked fibers. Yarn is often used in knitting and weaving to form cloth. The yarn emoji usually appears in chats and posts related to knitting, crocheting, and weaving.

Posting or reposting videos or pictures of woolens? Don’t forget to include this emoji! It can be a picture of a pair of knitted socks or a nice sweater; as long as it’s made of wool, you’re in the clear! You may also use the emoji in your knitting-related Facebook groups. If you need to head to the store to get some supplies for the new sweater, you may use the yarn emoji as well.

Best Paired With: A picture of whatever you’re knitting. It could be a sweater or a pair of socks. Because cats are crazy about yarn, send 🧶 together with a 🐈 cat emoji to show you’re in a playful mood. You may also do the same thing to show that your cat is having a ball with a piece of yarn!

 

Yen Banknote Emoji

Yen Banknote emoji, Apple version of the Yen Banknote emoji

Going to Tokyo? You’ll need to convert your cash to Yen, the official currency of Japan. The 💴 Yen banknote emoji shows a bundle of Yen banknotes held together by a white piece of paper. It’s used to enhance various content concerning money and wealth. You may use it in conversations about Japanese culture, too.

While sharing news posts, pictures, or videos on the Japanese economy, include the Yen Banknote emoji in the caption. If you bought something from a Japanese store and you’re texting someone about it, or talking about it in a group chat, you can use the Yen banknote emoji. It’s important to note that this emoji may be used humorously, too. By all means, include it in captions or chats of money-related GIFs and memes.

Best Paired With: The 🤑 money-mouth face to show you’re eager to spend a lot of money in Japan. If you hardly spent anything on a trip wondering where all your money went, put the 💸 money with wings emoji to show that money is flying away from your pockets.

 

Yin Yang Emoji

Yin Yang emoji, Apple version of the Yin Yang emoji

Discuss the duality of existence with the ☯️ Yin Yang emoji! This emoji displays the Yin Yang sign, one of the oldest symbols in China. It comprises a circle separated into two lines by a curved line. Half of the circle is black, to represent the Yin side, while the other side is white, to represent the Yang side. Two small dots are on both sides. On the black side, the circular symbol is white, while on the white side, the circle is black.

Yin Yang represents the concept of good and bad, how nothing is purely good or 100% bad. Good things have a little bad in them, and bad things have a little good in them. Even if they’re opposite forces of nature, they can still exist in harmony because they’re two halves of a whole.

Use the Yin Yang emoji to show “duality” in your posts or captions, such as to explain why good people may also have a bad side, or how criminals might still have some good in them. If your post is about balancing the physical and spiritual, put the Yin Yang emoji in there. Since Yin Yang is rooted in Chinese religion and philosophy, the Yin Yang emoji could be used in discussions relating to Chinese culture, Chinese spirituality, or both.

Best Paired With: The 💑 couple with heart emoji to talk about how couples who prove opposites attract. You might also consider pairing it up with other spiritual emojis, like the 🕉️ Om emoji and ♾️ infinity emoji.

 

Yellow Circle Emoji

yellow circle emoji

Light up your feed with the most vibrant color in the world—yellow! The 🟡 yellow circle emoji features a plain circle filled with bright, sunshiny yellow. Unlike the previous entries on the list, the yellow circle emoji is often used in a figurative sense. But if you’re familiar with color psychology and the power it can bring, it shouldn’t come as a surprise at all. Anyone who has studied the effect of color on an individual knows colors mean a lot of things. Sometimes, they can even have strong political stances attached to them.

Most use the yellow circle emoji to highlight or brighten just about anything, from road signs on a social media post to the dark look of an Instagram feed. The color simply exudes upliftment, illumination, and positivity. If this emoji could talk, it would probably say, while wearing a huge smile, “Chill out, buddy!” But since it can’t, the closest thing to that goal would be to put the yellow circle at the end of an empowering quote, such as, “Hold the vision. Trust the process,” or “Dream big and dare to fail.”

Meanwhile, other lovers of the color yellow like to incorporate the yellow circle into their work. They use it as brackets or bullet points in reports or presentations. If it inspires them to do better, then good for them!

Best Paired With: The ☀️ sun emoji or 🌞 sun with face emoji to say it’s too bright for you to go outside, or with the 🚦 vertical traffic light emoji to tell your driver to simply slow down at a yellow light.

 

Yellow Square Emoji

Yellow Square emoji, Apple version of the Yellow Square emoji, emojis that start with y

The 🟨 yellow square emoji is like the yellow circle emoji. The only difference would be its shape. Other than that, it’s quite the same. For instance, it’s often used to represent anything yellow. You can use this emoji when talking about the color yellow instead of typing the word out.

Since yellow is closely connected with summer, the sun, and all things sunny, placing the yellow square emoji at the end of a post is a MUST! However, if you’re a sports lover, or if you play sports professionally, the yellow square symbol holds extra meaning. In soccer, football, badminton, fencing, rugby, and field hockey, the yellow card serves as a caution given to a player who has committed misconduct or a serious offense.

Yellow Warning

In soccer, the referee shows the yellow penalty card to the player who broke the rules. He then records the details in a small notebook. What happens to the player, then? The player who received the yellow card may play again, but if he gets another yellow card, he will be given a red card and subsequently thrown out of the game.

When fans see that flash of yellow, it prompts them to post stacks of yellow square emojis to convey their disgust over a game or match.

Best Paired With: The 🖌️ paintbrush emoji to say you’ll be painting in yellow, or the 🟥 red square emoji to talk about a player that got kicked out of a game.

 

Yemen Flag Emoji

Yemen flag emoji, flag emoji, emojis that start with y

The 🇾🇪 Yemen flag emoji represents the Republic of Yemen. It’s the second-largest Arab nation in the world with a landmass of 203,850 square miles. Yemen is a country with a rich history and cherished culture, one that dates back to ancient times. Tourists from all over the world go to see Yemen’s mosques, mausoleums, and archeologists, some things the country is known for.

It’s not uncommon to see Yemenites, citizens of the country of Yemen, wave the Yemen flag emoji online to show how much they love the country! Regarding the flag emoji’s design, it is simply a smaller replica of the actual flag in Yemen.

Flag Colors

The national flag of Yemen is tri-colored: red, white, and black. These are the colors of the Arab Liberation Movement. What does each color mean? The red band represents the spilled blood during the fight for the independence of the country. The white line symbolizes hope for the future, while the black line represents the dark past of the country. Most of the time, the Yemen flag emoji appears in conversations related to different elements of Yemeni culture—from food to language, architectural landmarks, and so forth.

Best Paired With: Emojis of things or places that will remind you of Yemen even if they aren’t directly from Yemen. For instance, put the Yemen flag alongside the 🏜️ desert emoji to show the Arabian desert, or the Yemen flag emoji side by side with the 🕌 mosque emoji to highlight conversations about Yemen’s 1,200-year-old Al-Hadi Mosque, one of the historical mosques of the ancient city of Sa’ada, Yemen.

 

Letter Y Emoji

Letter Y emoji, Apple version of the Letter Y emoji, emojis that start with y

When you first lay your eyes on it, the letter Y emoji looks like it’s a symbol for the letter Y. But it’s definitely more than that. The Letter Y is also a regional indicator symbol, and it’s not the only one. There are 26 of these symbols, one for each letter of the alphabet.

What do they do? Basically, when these symbols are used together, they can order the platform that they’re on to do certain things. For instance, the Yemen flag emoji displayed above shows how the combination of the regional indicator symbols Y and E instructs the platform to display the Yemen flag. The platform knows it should handle these two symbols as one unit and not as individual letters.

Best Paired With: Other regional indicator symbols to create emoji flags.

 

Perfect 10

Just to recap, there are exactly 10 emojis that start with the letter Y: Yawning face, Yellow heart, Yo-yo, Yen banknote, Yin Yang, Yellow circle, Yellow square, Yemen flag, and the letter Y. Why aren’t they more? Maybe it’s because there aren’t that many words that start with Y to begin with, and not every word has an emoji version.

Aesthetic Tool

Office desk workspace with a pink background, laptop headphones and plants over pastel pink

Photo from Adobe Stock

You can still have fun with this new trend. If you’re not into TikTok, you can use emojis that start with Y to create a beautiful and cohesive Instagram aesthetic. Break away from the usual #OOTD or #mealtime posts; pick a few things from the emojis that start with Y list that resonates with you. Put them all in a vertical line, and below that line, talk about why you like each of them.

Or you can make a mood board featuring emojis that start with Y, then move on to other letters, emojis that start with N, O, etc. Be intentional about the images, colors, and texts you put in them. That’s what’s going to show up on your Instagram feed. If you need a little inspiration, different programs and apps such as Pinterest will help get your creativity flowing. Creating a mood board will help you find and define your own social media style, and completing the task with emojis will make it even more fun to do.

Teaching Kids

kid learning to read, two hands holding flash cards, remote learning

Photo from Adobe Stock

If you’re a teacher or a mom, you can use the emojis that start with Y trend to expand the vocabulary of your students. How? By making emoji flashcards! Use the cards to teach and explore feelings and words with your kids. Put the emoji on one side of the card, and the letters that make up the emoji on the other side. Ask your students to guess the emoji. If they correctly identify the object, person, or place, they win a prize! Begin with emojis that start with Y. When you’re done, move on to emojis that start with X, and so on and so forth.

In recent years, flashcards have been a popular and effective tool for training and teaching children. This engaging method of instruction uses a variety of subjects, images, and sounds to keep the kids’ interest. It is common knowledge that between the ages of 12 and 18 months, toddlers discern various noises and colors. As a result, flashcards are the perfect early learning tool for introducing new words, images, or concepts to young toddlers.

 

Conclusion

Attractive teen girl holding microphone in front of the TV, teen girl singing, young girl holding mp3 player

Photo from Adobe Stock

Are you the type to get caught up in fads? Is your radar constantly on the lookout for the next new cool thing to do, wear, or have? If you’re saying—that’s me!—then, we won’t judge you for that. It’s very hard to resist a fad when all your friends are keen on a certain object that suddenly becomes a must-have. It can also be very difficult to refuse what the rest of your tribe is playing with and using.

We get it, and we understand how you feel, but before you go ahead and take the plunge, why not do a little background check? Find out who started the fad, what it’s all about, and whether it is safe to do. Emojis that start with Y are part of a fun and harmless TikTok game, but not everything that is shown on TikTok is safe. Just because someone famous is doing it, does not mean it’s right for you to do it. At the end of the day, if it makes you start to lose yourself, it’s not worth the hype. But if you’re doing it for all the right reasons, don’t let anyone stop you!