🚨 Siren Emoji: The Emoji Of Emergency

There are two kinds of siren emoji. There’s the 🧜‍♀️ Mermaid emoji and the actual 🚨 Siren emoji. It can be your alarm emoji, telling you something big is happening. It could also be an alert emoji telling you something important. Its design is based on police car sirens. The kind you find on top of the standard cop car lights.

Many car lights symbolize a lot of meanings. Siren lights come in when it becomes car warning lights. They can have a rotating light inside accompanied by noises. Combining these two makes the loud police siren you can hear in movies when they’re on a high-speed chase.

Image from Adobe Stock

The police siren emoji isn’t the kind you see people use often, and that could be a good reason, too. Cop lights and sirens aren’t usually a good thing to hear. Especially since it means something bad’s brewing in your neighborhood. The police car sound is bad enough, but siren noise can just bring about a certain panic in you.

So how do we use it? And what’s the general purpose of a siren emoji? That’s an important question we all need to know.

Siren Emoji: Meaning And History

The 🚨 Police Car Revolving Light emoji is depicted as a rotating red light emoji. Red was chosen due to it being the most common one citizens see. This is because red is often used by cop cars. The appearance of it implies a police siren with lights. It was originally called “Police Car Light” on its release in 2010. Since 2015, it’s been renamed as “Police Cars Revolving Light.” Other names for the siren emoji are emergency lights and flashing lights. Incidentally, Apple names it as “Police Car’s Light” compared to the rest of the platforms.

Siren Emoji On Different Platforms

Most of the siren emojis have a uniform look across all the different platforms. The red sirens just change their form regarding their light and shade of red. Some siren emojis have no flashing lights at all.

For Samsung, the siren emoji features texture on its white bottom. Google’s version is less complicated. Their design has two layers of flashing lights on top of each other. As for Apple, it’s basically a three-dimensional version of Samsung’s.

Twitter’s siren emoji isn’t as red compared to the others. Facebook’s emoji is a three-dimensional one with shiny finishes. WhatsApp has a round top. Facebook Messenger also uses a circular top but has more of a charcoal bottom than white.

Popular Use Of The Siren Emoji

Using the siren emoji with the ⚠️ Warning emoji definitely means that it’s important. Sirens are for grabbing attention. It could be a public announcement. If you add the siren emoji with the 🚓 Police Car emoji, that implies that cops are present. There are also cases wherein you use the siren emoji to gather attention. Some people use the siren emoji when they make announcements regarding their personal lives. Others use it to make jokes or false alarms. Listed below are ways you can mix the siren emoji with other emojis to form a sentence.

🚨🚓👮‍♂️ – The cops are coming!

You can use these three emojis to warn people of cops or explain that you’ve witnessed a scene involving cops.

🚨🚨🚨 – Red alert!

This is often used to ring the alarm regarding many things. Some people use three sirens to grab the attention of other social media users. Importance is varied.

🚨🚑 – Medical Emergency!

A medical emergency regarding a loved one or a stranger. This is often with regard to being rushed to the hospital or needing to call 911.

👩‍🚒🔥🚨🚒 – Fire!

This combination increases the warning of fire and for someone to call the firemen.

The History Of Sirens

Originally, sirens were made as musical instruments. The first siren was just pieces of pneumatic tubes and disks that either rotated or stayed still. They also share the same name as mermaids.

Its transition into cop lights was difficult at first. Mostly because the technology at the time couldn’t make the siren lightweight. This was an issue for the 1920s police officers whose speed chasing or emergencies were delayed by its weight. Thanks to innovation, technology boomed quickly and allowed for sirens to become electronic.

Amplifiers attached with modulators and oscillators helped 60s police officers to regain a sense of speed. Automobiles invented also aid in its development. They even put speakers above the car beside the siren to create a mobile siren with our iconic flashing lights. The evolution allowed police cars with lights to make siren sounds. Over time, they learned to use sirens for other emergency vehicles as well. This evolution has helped save lives.

Different Siren Colors And Their Symbolism

They call them flashers, flashing lights, or flashing cop lights because of the siren’s light. Although the most common siren light is the red one, various siren lights are used to announce things to the public. A uniform understanding of these lights varies in degree. Some are for simple things, such as road repairs, while others signal life or death situations.

Red Siren

Red siren lights mean danger, hazard, or warning. They’re often used in the most dangerous situations, such as cop chases, medical emergencies, and crime scenes.

Green Siren

Green sirens are common for security and safety. Volunteer rescue members are the most common users. They don’t have the special option that the other sirens have for traffic laws.

Yellow Siren

Yellow lights are for caution. They’re used to tell you to slow down. You can see these on-road problems like construction or tow trucks.

Blue Siren

It’s often what accompanies the red siren to make police car lights. They’re only for EMTs, law enforcement, and firefighters.

White Siren

The white siren is usually accompanied by other colors. An example would be ambulance lights that are a mixture of white and red. Their purpose is to create a rotating light.

Car Siren Privileges

Source: Adobe Stock

Since it’s a very loud sound. When combined with emergency lights, sirens show government or important issues. Sirens are only allowed to be used by law enforcement, ambulances, and firetrucks. Special cases such as emergency rescue operations are also given this privilege. The traffic privileges one gets when they use sirens is that they don’t need to follow the traffic laws. Since most of the time they’re only lit up and used during emergencies, it’s only natural that traffic laws could delay them. It’s also important to note that you must give way regardless if you spot a car using the sirens. Because of this privilege, sirens are mostly banned from commercial or private use.

Uses Of Sirens In History

Sirens were used to alarm the public. Naturally, this meant that they were used a lot during World War I and World War II. An example would be the Stuka’s siren, which was used to cause fear and panic amongst the troops that were to be met with a bomb on the ground. Stukas were made in Germany and were also called Junkers Ju 87. England substituted church bells for sirens during this time. They were ordered to remain silent unless a German invasion was at hand.

During the cold war, Truman reused sirens. The atomic war could happen, and the United States government wanted to make sure all of its citizens were prepared. Today, sirens aren’t only used by mobile cars but also in tornado-prone areas. A tornado siren echoes loud across fields, warning people of the incoming danger.

Siren Head: The Creepy Version Of Sirens

Image from Amazon

Siren Head is a tall humanoid creature with two sirens in its head. Along with the infamous Slenderman, its fame rises from various created fan works and sightings. His name is interchangeable with Lamp Head. It can shape-shift and is an excellent master of disguise. It has the ability to mimicry air raids, music, radio static, and even voices of its devoured. You can hear it coming towards you because of the ongoing loud noises it makes. It was created by Trevor Henderson. Siren Head is said to be a violent predator. It lures its prey with familiar sounds before devouring them. Henderson explains that Siren Head is not a man-made experiment gone wrong, but a being from another dimension that humans cannot understand.

Conclusion

Now we know EMT, firefighter, and police sounds and lights are important to the siren emoji. It’s a pretty clear-cut idea on how and when to use it. The purpose of combining siren and light is to inform the public of important announcements. The gravity of the announcement depends on the user. If the user used it to make a joke, a personal announcement, or a serious note. Some people find siren sounds to cause panic rather than giving a calm and informed message. Whether you believe in it, Siren Head is also a popular creature created because of its sound. Regardless, we can all agree that the siren emoji should be taken seriously and used to make announcements that need the public’s attention.