Ohio State Emojis: How to Spell O-H-I-O

Those are the current names, the ones a screen reader announces and an emoji picker searches. The original 2010 names were different and clumsier, which is why old references disagree.

That is four characters but only three distinct ones, because the O repeats. All three were added in Unicode 6.0 in October 2010, and they were on iPhones by 2011 and on Android by 2013. Reference sites also label them Emoji 1.0, which is the 2015 release that first put version numbers on emoji rather than the date they arrived.

Copy the four characters exactly as they are. Nothing is hidden inside them: no joiners, no variation selectors, sixteen bytes in total. All three default to color already, so there is nothing to append to make them show up properly, and appending something is how a paste picks up stray characters.

The sequence does not draw letters. It copies the four arm positions of the cheer, which is how the tradition already works in person: four people, one letter each, made with the arms.

• O is 🙆, arms curved overhead until the hands meet. This is the only one of the four that is genuinely letter shaped.
• H is 🙌, both arms up. There is no crossbar in it on any platform and there never will be. It reads as the pose, not the letter.
• I is 🙋, a standing figure with one arm up.
• O is 🙆 again.

Being honest about the I: in a real O-H-I-O photo, the person on the I usually presses both arms straight overhead so the whole body reads as one vertical line. The emoji raises one arm. It is the loosest match of the four. It is also still what everyone uses, because Unicode has nothing better.

The fastest way is to copy the sequence at the top of this page. If you would rather type it, all four characters are in the standard emoji keyboard.

• iPhone and iPad: tap the emoji key and search. Search ok for the first character, raising hands for the second, raising hand for the third.
• Android: same three search terms from the Gboard emoji tab.
• Windows 10 and 11: hold the Windows key and press the period key to open the emoji picker, then search.
• Mac: hold Control and Command and press the space bar.
• Slack and Discord: type :ok_woman: :raised_hands: :raising_hand: :ok_woman: and it renders when you send, though the first and last can come back as the woman gendered figure depending on the app and its version. Pasting is more predictable.

Searching your emoji keyboard for ohio returns nothing at all. There is no Ohio emoji to find, which is the reason this page exists.

The sequence pastes cleanly into iMessage, Instagram captions and comments, Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, Discord, Gmail subject lines, and any browser text field. Two exceptions are worth knowing before you send it.

• On X, every emoji counts as two characters no matter how many codepoints it holds, so O-H-I-O costs eight of your 280.
• On a plain text message, one emoji re-encodes the whole message and drops the single message limit from 160 characters to 70. The four emoji eat eight of those 70. A long text with the cheer tacked on the end can quietly split into three billed parts. This applies to SMS only. iMessage and RCS are unaffected.

One more thing to expect: Slack shows Apple artwork to people on Macs and iPhones and Google artwork to everyone else, so the same message can look a little different on two desks in the same Columbus office.

Plenty of people try to spell it with the flag letters, the regional indicators. Run together with nothing between them, 🇴🇭🇮🇴 does not give you four letters. It gives you O, then H, then the flag of the British Indian Ocean Territory.

The rule behind it is short. Regional indicator letters pair up from the left. In O H I O the pairs are O plus H, then I plus O. No country has the code OH, so those two stay as letter tiles. IO is a real country code, so the last two letters silently merge into that territory's flag.

Here is the counterintuitive part. Putting a separator between the H and the I does not fix it. The pairing just restarts, the I and the last O are still next to each other, and you still get the flag. The separator has to fall between the I and the final O. The safe advice is to separate all four:

• With spaces: 🇴 🇭 🇮 🇴
• With plain hyphens: 🇴-🇭-🇮-🇴

Invisible separators such as a zero width space do work by the specification, but posting tools and content editors strip invisible characters without telling you, and you cannot see whether your paste survived. Use a separator you can see.

A letter tile that is not part of a pair is also allowed to fall back to a plain capital letter, and every platform draws that fallback its own way. That is one more reason the arm poses are the better answer.

Emoji directories list one. It does not work anywhere.

Unicode has a way to write subdivision flags as tag sequences, and one can be written for Ohio. But only three subdivision flags are on the recommended list that platforms actually build artwork for: England, Scotland and Wales. No US state is on that list. Paste the Ohio one and you get a plain black flag, or an empty box, on essentially every device. If a site offers it as a copy and paste without saying that, the site has not tested it.

Worth knowing anyway: the real Ohio flag is a swallowtail burgee adopted in 1902, designed by Cleveland architect John Eisenmann, and it is the only state flag in the country that is not a rectangle. The white and red disc in it stands for the O in Ohio and for the buckeye nut.

This is the real reason fans settled on the pose emoji. Unicode has color emoji letters for A, B, O and P, plus a circled M and a lowercase i. That is the entire list, and none of them is an H.

Two specific things to avoid:

• Do not use 🅾🅷🅸🅾. Only the O in that set is an emoji at all. The H and the I are plain text, so the sequence comes out as a mix of a color tile and two flat glyphs, and exactly what you get depends on the device. It looks broken because it is.
• Do not use ℹ️ as the I. Every major platform draws it as a lowercase i on a colored square. Wrong letter case, and no platform draws it in scarlet.

There is exactly one widely supported character whose glyph honestly reads as an H with a crossbar, the Pisces sign ♓, but every platform puts it on a purple tile and everyone will read it as a zodiac sign. Novelty only.

The standard sequence is the right default. Four substitutions are worth knowing, and each one is in the copy blocks above: the hollow red circle for both O letters, the O button for both O letters, the circled letters, and the fullwidth letters. Pick by where you are pasting.

A squared letter set (🄾🄷🄸🄾) also exists, but font coverage for it is patchy, so it can turn into empty boxes on someone else's screen. Skip it.

All three of the pose emoji accept the five skin tone modifiers, and none of them changes the arm position. One worked example is enough: 🙆🏽🙌🏽🙋🏽🙆🏽 is the same cheer in the same poses.

The modifier has to sit immediately after the character it belongs to. Put a space between them and you get a floating colored swatch instead of a tinted figure.

🙆 and 🙋 also have man and woman variants: 🙆‍♀️ 🙆‍♂️ 🙋‍♀️ 🙋‍♂️. 🙌 has no gendered forms. Unicode never encoded any, and on current platforms it is drawn as a pair of hands with no figure attached anyway. The default forms of the other two are people rather than a specified gender, and platforms draw them differently, which is why this page calls them figures.

It is a call and response. Someone shouts O-H and the answer comes back I-O. It happens in Ohio Stadium, on High Street, in airport gate areas, and between two strangers in a grocery line two time zones away. It was done at the White House when the 2014 national championship team was honored there.

Inside the stadium the four letters travel around the bowl, each side taking one in turn, roughly a hundred thousand people passing a four letter word around a concrete horseshoe.

The photo version is older than most people assume. The university identifies a 1936 photograph of cheerleaders inside Ohio Stadium as the first O-H-I-O picture ever taken.

The origin story told most often, published on a university blog, runs like this: during the war, Navy sailors aboard the USS Lexington chanted O-H-I-O S-T-A-T-E to the tune of Row, Row, Row Your Boat. One of them, Matthew Sidley, enrolled at Ohio State after the war, joined the cheerleading squad, and taught it to the Ohio Stadium crowd on November 1, 1947 against Indiana. The nine letter version was too much for a crowd to hold, so it shortened to four. Take that as the story most often told rather than settled history. The university's own O-H-I-O page says fans were already shouting it in the late 1800s, and the 1936 photo predates the shipboard chant by six years.

The clearest link between the shout and the arms comes after the final whistle, when the crowd and the team sing Carmen Ohio, the alma mater, and everyone spells the four letters with their arms.

Ohio Stadium opened in 1922, seats 102,780, has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1974, and sits at 411 Woody Hayes Drive. Nobody local calls it that. It is the Horseshoe, or just the Shoe.

The four person photo pose turns up well beyond the stadium: on the Oval in front of Thompson Library, at Mirror Lake, at Buckeye Grove, where a tree is planted for each football All-American, at the Skull Session in St. John Arena a couple of hours before kickoff, in the west campus lots across State Route 315, which open six hours before kickoff, and up and down High Street through the Short North under the seventeen lighted arches, on the walk from downtown toward campus.

Two things people ask about in the same breath. Script Ohio, the band formation, was first performed in 1936, and band director Eugene Weigel based the looping script on the marquee of the Loew's Ohio Theatre on East State Street downtown, which is still standing. The i is dotted by a fourth year or fifth year sousaphone player, who turns and bows deeply to both sides of the stadium.

And the game at the end of November is called The Game. Fans have a long running habit, traced back to Woody Hayes refusing to say the other school's name, of writing it in lowercase. That is a fan convention, described here rather than adopted.

A lot of people searching for Ohio emojis want the state, not the football team. Here is the honest inventory, gaps included.

Columbus has no emoji of its own either. The city sits where the Scioto and the Olentangy meet, it is the largest city in Ohio and the seat of Franklin County, and Unicode has nothing to say about any of it.

If you searched OSU emojis and landed here, a quick sort out. In Columbus, OSU means The Ohio State University, and the emoji answer is the sequence at the top of this page. In Stillwater it means Oklahoma State, and in Corvallis it means Oregon State. Written in lowercase with an exclamation mark, osu! is a rhythm game with a large emote culture of its own, and it owns most of the search results for that phrase. OSU is also the airport code for Ohio State University Airport on the northwest side of Columbus.

One clarification for anyone who arrived wanting team artwork: licensed artwork is a separate thing and is not covered here. This page is only about the plain Unicode characters that anyone can type on any device for free.

A screen reader announces the four characters by their names: person gesturing OK, raising hands, person raising hand, person gesturing OK. That tells a blind reader nothing about Ohio.

So if the sequence is carrying the meaning in your post, put the letters in the text as well, with the emoji after them: O-H-I-O 🙆🙌🙋🙆. On a web page, wrap the run in an element with role="img" and give it a label that spells the letters out with commas between them, so a synthesizer reads O, H, I, O instead of pronouncing the word Ohio.