Speaking Head Emoji 🗣️

Submission 26,607

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About

The Speaking Head Emoji 🗣️ refers to an Apple emoji that's a blue silhouette of a male head shouting something. Often paired with the fire emoji (🔥), 🗣️ became a meme in 2023 when it was used in captions and comments written in all-caps to signify shouting the phrase. The emoji's usage was predominantly inspired by sports and hip-hop accounts on X, formerly Twitter, in 2017. Some memes that use the 🗣️ emoji are We Making It Out the Hood With This One, I Got 2 Phones and Pluh 🗣️, among many others. Overall, its usage predominantly manifested on TikTok in spam comments and text captions.

Origin

Starting in 2017, viral usage of the speaking head emoji started to spread on X, formerly Twitter, predominantly started by Premier League football accounts. For instance, on January 7th, 2017, the X^[1] account of Aston Villa F.C. used the speaking head emoji in a post that gained over 130 likes in six years, becoming the first within the community of brand accounts (shown below, left). On January 22nd, the X^[2] account of Arsenal used the 🗣️ emoji in a post that gained roughly 2,100 likes in six years (shown below, right).

In early 2017, non-brand accounts on X^[3]^[4] started to use the emoji, often using it after every word in a sentence. Its first viral usage in this context was a quote of a since deleted tweet posted by X^[5] user @DarnThatStayceJ on April 21st, 2017, who made a joke about grey sweatpants, gaining roughly 8,500 likes in six years (shown below).

Spread

Going into 2017 and the rest of the late 2010s, viral usage of the speaking head emoji spread to verified basketball and American football accounts such as Bleacher Report.^[6] The X^[7] account of XXL Magazine also started to use the emoji, indicating its usage in hip-hop and rap circles such as on the pages of RapTV. The usage of "🗣️" from the aforementioned pages and others like them continued into the 2020s, eventually resulting in ironic usage.

Although it's hard to pinpoint the first ironic usage of "🗣️," ironic usage appears to have predominantly manifested in early 2023 within comment sections. For instance, on January 8th, 2023, TikToker^[8] @user4478298144 posted a video with text reading, "when someone posts a tiktok speaking nonsense and all the comments are just like "WHAT ⁉️💯🔥❗️🗣," gaining roughly 12,400 plays and 580 likes in eight months (shown below). Its usage in comments during the timeframe could also be likened to usage of Let Him Cook.

In May 2023, TikToks and comments using the 🗣️ emoji became increasingly viral and commonplace. For instance, on May 7th, TikToker^[9] @gummabor posted a response video to a comment about A-Train which used the 🗣️ emoji, gaining roughly 125.7 million plays and 11.2 million likes in four months (shown below, left). On May 15th, 2023, TikToker^[10] @mighty_eagle522 posted a video with the word "blud", the 🗣️ emoji and a Don Pollo sound, gaining roughly 1.5 million plays and 189,300 likes in four months (shown below, right).

We Making It Out of X With This One

We Making It Out of X With This One is a phrasal meme format most commonly used to comment on music videos on YouTube, based on the earlier We Not Making It Out the Hood format. The phrasal template gained popularity in February 2023, with users humorously altering it to reference the lyrics of the song, predominantly pairing it with the speaking head emoji 🗣️ and the fire emoji 🔥.

Pluh / "Plug" Sound Effect

Pluh, also known as "Plug" Sound Effect, Plugg Tag or Plug Producer Tag, refers to a hip-hop producer tag and sound effect used in rap songs of a guy saying the word "plug" (a slang term for a drug dealer), however, he pronounces it like "pluh." The producer tag was created for the rap collective BeatPluggz in 2015, used frequently by producer MexikoDro across songs with Playboi Carti and Kodak Black, among others, resulting in the eventual Pluggnb genre of Trap Music. The sound became increasingly viral and used in memes in 2022 and 2023, following YouTube streamer Fulcrum's use of the sound in his videos. Thereafter, many memes on TikTok and elsewhere used the sound. The predominant TikTok usage in 2023 was horny ASMR with female voices saying suggestive or lewd things, interrupted by the "pluh" sound to symbolize the man's response. Most of the TikTok memes used Overwatch or Fortnite footage. Written usage of "pluh" often included the speaking head emoji 🗣️.