What the emoji means
is the Shovel: a broad blade on a long handle, used for digging and moving material. Unicode's keywords are bury, dig, garden, hole, plant, scoop and tool.
It completes a tool set that already had 🔨 hammer, 🔧 wrench, 🪛 screwdriver and 🪚 saw, but nothing for the most basic digging implement there is.
How people use
- Gardening. Planting, allotments, landscaping - the literal use.
- Construction and groundwork. Building sites, trenches, foundations.
- "Digging up." Resurfacing an old post, tweet or photo - one of the most common figurative uses online.
- "Stop digging." The proverb about being in a hole. Used when someone is making an argument worse.
- Burying something. Both literal and figurative - letting a topic die.
Related tool emoji
- ⛏️ Pick - for rock rather than soil, and heavily used in Minecraft contexts.
- 🔨 Hammer and 🛠️ Hammer and Wrench - general tooling.
- 🪚 Carpentry Saw - added 2021.
- 🌱 Seedling - what usually follows the digging.
- 🪣 Bucket - the other half of most digging jobs.
