The Dying Rose Emoji Is Suddenly Everywhere, So Here's Some Info on What It Means

Things change on the internet basically every day. The way people talked there yesterday might not be how they talk today, and that's also true of the emojis people use. The dying rose emoji is starting to show up in more and more posts across various platforms, and plenty of people are looking for answers as to what it means.

Although no one sat down and defined the dying rose, there seem to be some agreed-upon rules for how it's used. Here's what we know.

The dying rose emoji seems to stand in for the broken heart emoji in posts. The swap seems to have happened because some people feel that the broken heart emoji is now played out or too common. Typically, a dying rose is used to mean heartbreak or sadness and might be attached to the end of a post as a sign of ironic sadness about a specific topic.

It's not the kind of emoji you might use in a serious situation (although in the most serious situations, it's probably good to minimize emoji use). Instead, it's the kind of thing you might post in a sort of ironic way, as in the post "U probably have a job🥀" on Reddit. It's meant to signal in a subtle way that the person who left the comment doesn't have a job, and that makes them sad.

Another Redditor offered their own explanation. "It's a replacment for 💔. 💔 is a replacment for 🙏😭. 🙏😭 is a replacement for 💀. 💀 is a replacement for 🤣."

That may or may not be true, but what it really makes clear is that the use of emojis is always evolving. Generally speaking, a dying rose seems to be a symbol of sadness, although again, it's a type of sadness that is at least a little detached and ironic.

Although it can seem impossible to keep up with every single emoji and acronym on the internet actually means, it's often fairly intuitive. A dying rose is a sad thing because roses are beautiful and often represent love. If you see the emoji, you can rely on your own understanding of it in the world without thinking that it might be a stand-in for something else, which is definitely the case sometimes.

It's impossible to say how long the dying rose will mean what it means, or how long it will even be in use. As you probably know, things like this change all the time on the internet, and we're just left to figure out what they mean.

We don't know how the dying rose trend got started or how it became a part of the language of online life. What we do know, though, is that it's usually a stand-in for feeling sad, and for now, that will have to be enough.