🍆 Eggplant emoji

The eggplant emoji first debuted in 2010 and quickly became a symbol for the penis. According to “Among the New Words,” a quarterly article in the journal American Speech, the eggplant emoji was used on Twitter to mean “penis” as early as 2011. In March of 2014, the video artist Jesse Hill “translated” Beyoncé’s hit song “Drunk in Love” into emoji, using the eggplant to represent Jay Z’s penis.

Later that year, the emoji inspired a trend on Instagram and other social-media sites called “#EggplantFriday,” a hashtag that was linked to posts where men posted explicit images of their “eggplants.” But in 2015, Instagram actually blocked the eggplant emoji and references to it (e.g., “#eggplant”) from its search functionality. Instagram’s ban resulted in a campaign called “#FreetheEggplant,” modeled after the similar campaign “#FreetheNipple,” in 2012 for gender equality.

In 2016, the American Dialect Society named the eggplant emoji the “Most Notable Emoji” of 2015 due to its widespread use as sexual innuendo. The eggplant emoji has also inspired two companies, Eggplant in the Mail and the Eggplant Mail, which let customers send actual eggplants in the mail as gag gifts. And, the company Emojibrator released an eggplant emoji vibrator in 2016 … of course.