U+2699 · emoji since 2015
The gear is a toothed cog, the icon for settings and machinery. It means engineering, tinkering, and how things work under the hood.
It marks tech settings and fixing things, and tags getting the gears turning on a new idea.
In texting, ⚙️ does not carry a widely used hidden or slang meaning, so you can usually take it at face value. People send it just as it looks, to add a little visual touch or set the mood of a message. Only a handful of emoji have a separate texting code, and ⚙️ is not really one of them.
Its official Unicode name is the Gear emoji. In everyday chat most people just call it the gear emoji or describe what it shows. Copy and paste it from the button at the top of this page.
The ⚙️ leads off a short phrase, and the rest of the words are written in cipher, every letter disguised as another emoji. Tap decipher to reveal the whole line.
Or make your own cipher in the translator.