This character is a Other Symbol and is commonly used, that is, in no specific script. The character is also known as bronze medal.
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+1F949 offers a line break opportunity at its position, except in some numeric contexts.
The CLDR project calls this character “3rd place medal” for use in screen reading software. It assigns these additional labels, e.g. for search in emoji pickers: 3rd, bronze, medal, place, third.
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: 🥉︎ See the Emojipedia for more details on this character’s emoji properties.
The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:
A bronze medal in sports and other similar areas involving competition is a medal made of bronze awarded to the third-place finisher of contests or competitions such as the Olympic Games, Commonwealth Games, etc. The outright winner receives a gold medal and the second place a silver medal. More generally, bronze is traditionally the most common metal used for all types of high-quality medals, including artistic ones. The practice of awarding bronze third place medals in the Olympic Games began at the 1904 Olympic Games in St. Louis, Missouri, before which only first and second places were awarded.