Eggplant, aubergine, brinjal: one vegetable, and one emoji for all three names. Eggplant emoji copy and paste here adds the vegetable shelf it sits on, four purple emoji, eight names and 14 combos, five built from real recipes.
Read the full guide
Three search words, eight names
CLDR, Unicode's list of search words for emoji, files Eggplant under three words only: aubergine, eggplant and vegetable. Brinjal, berenjena and melanzana find our own tiles instead, and recipe finds the five combos built from Wikipedia's ingredient lists.
Which name goes where
One vegetable, eight names holds the words and where each is usual: eggplant in North American and Australian English, aubergine in British English and French, brinjal in Indian and South African English. The Arabic word is the one the European names descend from, and θε serves both Chinese and Japanese.
Tips
Eggplant is not among the seven emoji CLDR files under purple. Four of them are here; search purple.
Ratatouille is missing its courgette: Unicode has no courgette, zucchini or squash emoji. Caponata loses its celery the same way.
The Text style switch is here for one tile: Hot pepper. Eggplant has no text form.
Questions and answers
Is there an aubergine emoji?
Yes, and it is this one. Unicode's formal character name for U+1F346 is AUBERGINE; eggplant is the short name CLDR gives it in English. There is one character, not two, so copying under either name gets the same emoji.
Is an eggplant a fruit or a vegetable?
Both, depending on who is asked. Botanically the fruit is a berry, and cooks use it as a vegetable. Unicode sides with the cooks and files the emoji under vegetables, while Tomato, a fellow nightshade, is filed with the fruit.
Why is it called an eggplant?
Because the first ones to get the name were white. The word, first recorded in 1763, was applied to white cultivars that look like hen's eggs. Our Egg, plant combo takes the name literally: an egg, then a potted plant.
π«Bell pepperU+1FAD1. CLDR also lists capsicum. Peppers are nightshades too. Emoji 13.0.
π₯¦BroccoliU+1F966. CLDR lists cabbage for it, and wild. Emoji 5.0.
π₯CarrotU+1F955. Three search words: carrot, food and vegetable. Emoji 3.0.
π₯CucumberU+1F952. CLDR lists pickle for it as well. Emoji 3.0.
π½Ear of cornU+1F33D. Filed under corn and maize, and under maze. Emoji 0.6.
πEggplantU+1F346. Eggplant is the CLDR name. The character name Unicode gave it is AUBERGINE, so both words find it. It has no text form. Emoji 0.6.
π§GarlicU+1F9C4. Two words again, flavoring and garlic. Only Onion shares the first. Emoji 12.0.
πΆοΈHot pepperU+1F336 U+FE0F. The only tile on this page with a text form. CLDR gives it two words, hot and pepper, and vegetable is not one. Emoji 0.7.
π₯¬Leafy greenU+1F96C. Filed under kale, lettuce, bok and choy, and under burgers. Emoji 11.0.
π«OliveU+1FAD2. Filed with the fruit. It stands in for the olive oil in two of the recipes below. Emoji 13.0.
π§ OnionU+1F9C5. CLDR gives it two words: flavoring and onion. Emoji 12.0.
π«Pea podU+1FADB. Filed under edamame and beanstalk. Emoji 15.0.
π₯PotatoU+1F954. Another nightshade: the same plant family as the eggplant. Emoji 3.0.
π TomatoU+1F345. Unicode files it with the fruit and CLDR lists vegetable for it anyway. A nightshade, like the eggplant. Emoji 0.6.
Show all 40 eggplant tiles (26 more)
Other purple emoji 4
πͺ»HyacinthU+1FABB. A flower CLDR files under purple, violet, lilac, lavender and indigo. Emoji 15.0.
π£Purple circleU+1F7E3. Two search words: circle and purple. Emoji 12.0.
πPurple heartU+1F49C. CLDR files seven emoji under purple. Eggplant is not one of them; this is. Emoji 0.6.
πͺPurple squareU+1F7EA. Two search words: purple and square. Emoji 12.0.
One vegetable, eight names 8
Ψ¨Ψ§Ψ°ΩΨ¬Ψ§ΩEggplant in Arabic (bΔαΈinjΔn), the root of the European names
aubergineAubergine: French, and usual in British English
berenjenaEggplant in Spanish. By Wikipedia French got aubergine from a longer Spanish form, alberenjena.
brinjalBrinjal: usual in Indian and South African English
θEggplant in one Han characterU+8304 CJK unified ideograph-8304. Unihan defines it in a single word: eggplant. The Japanese reading it lists is nasu.
melanzanaEggplant in Italian. By Wikipedia Italians once reheard the word as mela insana, mad apple.
Solanum melongenaThe Linnaean name, for a plant label
Recipe and vegetable combos 14
ππ«ππ§Baba ghanoushEggplant, then olive, then lemon, then garlic. Roasted eggplant, olive oil, lemon juice and tahini. No emoji stands for tahini.
ππBrinjal curryEggplant, then curry rice. The vegetable under its Indian English name, with rice.
ππ π«CaponataEggplant, then tomato, then olive. Sicilian. The celery and the capers have no emoji, so they are taken as read.
π₯πͺ΄Egg, plantEgg, then potted plant. The name, taken literally. It was first given to white cultivars that look like hen's eggs.
π π₯π½πMarket stallTomato, then cucumber, then ear of corn, then eggplant. Four to a crate, no plastic.
ππ₯Moussaka, both waysEggplant, then potato. Described as an eggplant- or potato-based dish. This one declines to choose.
ππ π₯π«Nightshade familyEggplant, then tomato, then potato, then bell pepper. Four food plants of one family, the Solanaceae.
ππ₯On the grillEggplant, then fire. How baba ghanoush starts: over an open flame.
ππ π§ParmigianaEggplant, then tomato, then cheese wedge. Fried slices layered with tomato sauce and mozzarella, then baked.
πππ£Purple patchPurple heart, then eggplant, then purple circle. For anyone colour-coding a message.
ππ π«π§ π§RatatouilleEggplant, then tomato, then bell pepper, then onion, then garlic. The usual list also has courgette, and Unicode has no courgette.
π±ππ₯Seed to supperSeedling, then eggplant, then shallow pan of food. A growing season in three emoji.
ππ«Technically a berryEggplant, then blueberries. Botanically, the eggplant is a berry. The blueberries were not consulted.
ππ₯π₯¦π₯¬π₯Veg boxEggplant, then carrot, then broccoli, then leafy green, then cucumber. This week's delivery. The eggplant is on top because it is its page.
How this list was compiled: Built by script on 2026-09-19, not typed by hand. The 18 emoji, their names, code points and Emoji version numbers come from emoji-test.txt, version 18.0 (https://www.unicode.org/Public/18.0.0/emoji/emoji-test.txt); names are the CLDR short names printed in that file, in sentence case. Eggplant is the single code point U+1F346, filed under food-vegetable; tomato and olive are filed there under food-fruit. The search words are from the CLDR English annotations (https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr/blob/main/common/annotations/en.xml and https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr/blob/main/common/annotationsDerived/en.xml, main branch). CLDR lists exactly aubergine, eggplant and vegetable for it, and lists the word purple for seven other emoji. The text forms come from emoji-variation-sequences.txt, version 18.0.0 (https://www.unicode.org/Public/18.0.0/ucd/emoji/emoji-variation-sequences.txt). Every character that is not an emoji was checked against UnicodeData.txt, version 18.0.0 (https://www.unicode.org/Public/18.0.0/ucd/UnicodeData.txt), and a note that names a character uses its name from that file. The character name of U+1F346 there is AUBERGINE. That U+8304 means eggplant and reads nasu in Japanese is from the kDefinition, kJapaneseKun and kJapanese values of the Unihan database, version 18.0.0 (https://www.unicode.org/Public/18.0.0/ucd/Unihan.zip). Wikipedia's article Eggplant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggplant) records the names eggplant, aubergine and brinjal and where each is usual, the Arabic, Spanish, French, Italian, Chinese and Japanese words, that French aubergine came by way of Spanish alberenjena, that Italian melanzana was reheard as mela insana, the Linnaean name, that the fruit is a berry by botanical definition, and that the word eggplant, first recorded in 1763, was first applied to white cultivars that look like hen's eggs. That potato, tomato, pepper and eggplant are food species of the Solanaceae is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanaceae. The ingredients behind five combos are the ones Wikipedia's articles list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratatouille, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parmigiana, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baba_ghanoush, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moussaka and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caponata. The 14 combos are this site's own choice, and the combo names are our own. The page is kept to the vegetable on purpose: no face, hand or fruit pairings. All sources were checked on 2026-09-19. Licence: own work: the selection, the combo names, the text drawings and the notes are ours. Emoji names, code points and search words are Unicode and CLDR data, and the Han definitions are Unihan data, used under the Unicode License v3 (https://www.unicode.org/license.txt). Facts from Wikipedia are restated in our own words and credited in the source line.