Spider and web emoji
🕷︎ SPIDER and 🕸︎ SPIDER WEB were added in Unicode 7.0 in 2014. Spiders are arachnids, not insects: they have eight legs, like their relative the scorpion 🦂. That is why they sit apart from the insect emoji such as 🐜 ant and 🐝 honeybee.
People use 🕷︎ for Halloween, horror films, goth and witchy aesthetics, and of course to warn friends about a spider in the bathroom. 🕸︎ on its own often means something is old or abandoned, like a dusty account: "this blog has 🕸︎".
Text spider art
The classic text spider /╲/\╭(ఠఠ益ఠఠ)╮/\╱\ is built from box-drawing lines for legs, the Telugu letter ఠ for its many eyes and the Chinese character 益 as a mouth. It pastes as plain text, so it works in Discord, Twitch chat, YouTube comments and game chats.
For a tiny one that fits anywhere, use /\oo/. Because these are made of ordinary characters, they keep your text color and do not turn into emoji.
Spiders for Halloween
Pair 🕷︎ and 🕸︎ with bats, ghosts and pumpkins to build spooky borders for October posts and party invites. Find more on the Halloween symbols, bat symbol and ghost symbol pages.
For a web hanging in the corner of a post, put 🕸︎ at the start of the first line and 🕷︎ a line or two below it, as if the spider were dropping down on its thread. In Discord channel names, a short label like 🕸︎┊spooky-chat looks neat and stays readable.
To type them, search for "spider" in your phone's emoji keyboard, press Win + . on Windows, or press Control + Command + Space on a Mac.