Two hands pressed together. Depending on who you ask, 🙏 is a prayer, a thank you, a please, a greeting, or, for a stubborn minority, a high five.

The character's official name is Person with Folded Hands, and it came into Unicode 6.0 in 2010 from Japanese phone emoji. In Japan, Emojipedia explains, the gesture means please or thank you, and that is still how many people use it: "thanks so much for covering my shift 🙏".

In many other places the same image reads as prayer, and it is often sent that way: in hope ("please let the train be on time 🙏"), in sympathy, in faith. Emojipedia also links it to respectful greetings in Asian traditions, such as namaste and the Buddhist añjali mudrā.

Then there is the high five. Because the hands are pressed together, some people see two people slapping palms, and some keyboards even suggest it that way. Emojipedia notes that it is rarely used as a high five, despite keyboard search features often suggesting it as one.

The useful thing to know is that all of the main readings are friendly. Gratitude, request, respect and prayer sit close together, which is why 🙏 rarely causes offence. The one place to be careful is sympathy. To a religious reader it says praying for you; to a non-religious one it may feel like it assumes their beliefs. If you mean "thinking of you", saying so is warmer.