This character is a Other Symbol and is commonly used, that is, in no specific script.
The glyph is not a composition. Its East Asian Width is wide. In bidirectional text it acts as Other Neutral. When changing direction it is not mirrored. U+1F40C offers a line break opportunity at its position, except in some numeric contexts.
The CLDR project calls this character โsnailโ for use in screen reading software. It assigns these additional labels, e.g. for search in emoji pickers: animal, escargot, garden, nature, slug.
This character is designated as an emoji. It will be rendered as colorful emoji on conforming platforms. To reduce it to a monochrome character, you can combine it with Variation Selector-15: ๐๏ธ See the Emojipedia for more details on this characterโs emoji properties.
The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:
A snail is a shelled gastropod. The name is most often applied to land snails, terrestrial pulmonate gastropod molluscs. However, the common name snail is also used for most of the members of the molluscan class Gastropoda that have a coiled shell that is large enough for the animal to retract completely into. When the word "snail" is used in this most general sense, it includes not just land snails but also numerous species of sea snails and freshwater snails. Gastropods that naturally lack a shell, or have only an internal shell, are mostly called slugs, and land snails that have only a very small shell (that they cannot retract into) are often called semi-slugs.
Snails have considerable human relevance, including as food items, as pests, and as vectors of disease, and their shells are used as decorative objects and are incorporated into jewelry. The snail has also had some cultural significance, tending to be associated with lethargy. The snail has also been used as a figure of speech in reference to slow-moving things.