Useful Notes / Emojis

The infamous "Face with Tears of Joy" emoji as seen in various sets^note L-R, top-bottom: Apple iOS; Android Oreo/Pie; Android Nougat; Twitter Twemoji; Microsoft Windows 10 since 2016; Samsung Galaxy Experience/One UI; JoyPixels 5.0; Facebook as of 2018; WhatsApp; OpenMoji; Android KitKat/Lollipop/Marshmallow; Android Jelly Bean; Microsoft Windows before 2016; Samsung Galaxy Touchwiz; JoyPixels 3.1; JoyPixels 2.2; Facebook before 2018; Firefox Emoji; Facebook Messenger; LG; HTC; Softbank 2014; Softbank before 2008; au by KDDI. The latter seven sets have been discontinued.

"And, as the pace of life gets faster and faster...and attention spans get shorter and shorter and... (You're probably not even listening to me right now.) Who has the time to type out actual words? And that's where we come in, the most important invention in the history of communication... Emojis!"

— Gene, The Emoji Movie

Emojis are one-character pictures used to convey a wide range of emotions, people, things, and locations. The word comes from Japanese e ("picture") + moji ("character"), and its resemblance to the English word "emotion" is a total coincidence.

Emojis started becoming popular in Japan in 1999 as a simpler way to send emoticons over smartphones. Apple started supporting emojis in 2008 initially for Japanese users only, and in 2011 for the rest of the world. Android and Windows followed suit two years later. Emojis quickly became the trendiest way to send pictures as text over the internet.

The Unicode Consortium is responsible for approving new emojis, and different platforms decide how they will render each one (see right). Every year Unicode approves a hundred or so new emojis. In 2015, Unicode added the option to change the skin tone of people emojis, and the group has pushed for adding emojis more representative of all the people who use them. For example, in 2019 Unicode announced the addition of emojis which represent different disabilities.

Compare to ASCII Art, Emoticon, and Henohenomoheji.

---

Emojis have the following tropes:

Tropes 🛋️

• 555: Used in many versions of the pager emoji (📟).
• All Deserts Have Cacti: 🏜️
• Ambiguous Gender: The default for most of the people-in-roles emojis.
• Animesque:
  • Since emojis were originally just for Japanese smartphone users, they have an outsized Japanese influence. See: 🗾^note No other country has its own map, 🗻^note Mount Fuji, Japan, 🏣^note Japanese Post Office, 🥟^note Dumpling, 🎑^note Moon Viewing Ceremony, 💮^note In the Apple version has the Japanese text "well done"., 🗼^note Tokyo Tower, 🏯^note Japanese Castle, ⛩️^note Shinto Shrine, 📛^note name badge used in Japanese kindergartens, ㊗️^note celebration
  • The facial expressions and gestures borrow a lot from Japanese media. See: 😪 😅 😜 🙇 🙏 💢 👹 👺.
• Art Evolution: Emojis started out as very pixellated graphics on smartphones, but soon transitioned to vector graphics to render better in other media.
• Blue Means Cold: 🥶
• Blue with Shock: 😨
• Bowdlerise: In 2016, Apple changed the gun emoji (🔫) into a toy pistol. Most of the other major smartphone providers soon followed suit.
• The Cameo: The paperclip emoji (📎) on Windows 11 is none other than Clippy.
• Card Games: 🃏 (Joker card), ♥️ ♣️ ♦️ ♠️ (card suits), 🎴 (Hanafuda card)
• Cartoon Meat: 🥩🍗🍖🥓
• Catching Some Z's: 😴 💤
• Cat Folk: Several people emojis (😀😁😂😍😗😥😡) have cat cartoon counterparts (😺😸😹😻😽😿😾).
• Cat Ninja: 🐱‍👤^note The Ninja Cat emoji is only rendered by Microsoft in Windows 10's Segoe Color Emoji font; they dropped it with the Fluent design emojis in Windows 11.
• Circling Birdies: 💫
• Cool Shades: 😎
• Cross-Popping Veins: 💢
• Crying Critters: 😿
• Cry Laughing: 😂 🤣 😹
• Depending on the Artist: Emojis render differently based on which platform or operating system they're viewed on.
• Distaff Counterpart: To avoid accusations of sexism, most emojis are either gender-neutral or have both male and female counterparts.
• Everything's Better with Sparkles: 💖 (sparkling heart)
• Everything's Sparkly with Jewelry: The Ring emoji on Mozilla Firefox OS 2.5 has sparkles.

• The Face of the Sun: 🌞 is a cartoon sun with a smiling face on it.
• Facepalm: 🤦 is a person with closed eyes putting a hand on their face.
• "Far Side" Island: 🏝️ is a small island with a palm tree on it. The island is barely bigger than the tree itself.
• Fascinating Eyebrow: 🤨 is a face with one eyebrow raised.
• Five-Token Band: Each person emoji has six colors. The default is yellow (i.e. 🧑), and after that the skin tones range from light to medium to dark (🧑🏻 🧑🏼 🧑🏽 🧑🏾 🧑🏿).
• Flipping the Bird: 🖕
• Flower Motifs: Apple's version of the White Flower emoji (💮) has the Japanese text "you did very well", since Japanese teachers often use it as a stamp of approval.
• Genie in a Bottle: 🧞^note The Genie emoji is usually rendered as coming out of a lamp.
• The Greys: 👽^note The Alien emoji is grey on some platforms and green on others.
• Hand Signals: 👌 🤟^note American Sign Language for "I love you". 👋
• Heart Symbol: There are quite a few ❤️ emojis, here's a list of them.
• High-Pressure Emotion: 😤^note Originally called "Face With Look of Triumph", this emoji is now mostly used to express Huffing With Anger.
• Internal Homage: Apple's Open Book emoji (📖) has text from its "Think Different" advertising campaign.
• Japanese Politeness: 🙏 🙇
• Jenny's Number: WhatsApp's version of the pager emoji has the number "867-5309".
• Jolly Roger: 🏴‍☠️ is a black flag with a skull and crossbones on it.
• Lady in Red: The dancer emoji 💃 is often described as a sexy, confident woman and wears a red dress.
• Lost in Translation:
  • Since emojis originated in Japan, some of them have distinctive Japanese meanings which have mostly been lost in western culture. For example, 💢 means anger (not firecrackers), 🙇 is bowing (not a kid trying to act cute), 💮 is a stamp of approval (not just a flower), 🙏 means please please or thank you (not praying), and 💨 means dashing away (not farting).
  • Even outside of Japan, some emojis have evolved from their original meanings. 😤 was originally called "Face With Look of Triumph", but is mostly used for expressing anger. 🙆 is called "Person Gesturing OK", though it's also used as Ballerina or Hands On Head. 💁 is originally "Information Desk Person" and it's used as Hair Flip or Sassy Girl.
  • A study from the University of Minnesota found that people give wildly different descriptions for the same emoji rendered on different platforms.
• Lotus Position: 🧘
• Lucky Seven: 🎰 is a slot machine with three 7s in a row.
• The Man in the Moon: 🌝 🌚
• Monkey Morality Pose: 🙈 🙉 🙊
• Mother Nature: 🌬️
• Music Is Eighth Notes: Musical Note (🎵) and Musical Notes (🎶) are eighth notes.
• Nerd Glasses: 🤓
• No Mouth: 😶
• Non-Ironic Clown: 🤡
• Ocular Gushers: 😭
• Oni: 👹
• Pinocchio Nose: 🤥
• Playboy Bunny: 👯^note No, those aren't ballerinas with headbands.
• Pose of Supplication: 🙇
• Product Placement: The video game emoji (🎮), which takes the form of a gamepad, is an Xbox Wireless Controller on Microsoft platforms, with Skype's (animated!) version◊ more explicitly showing it to be the first version of the controller that came with the Xbox One.
• Puppy-Dog Eyes: 🥺
• Retcon: Many emojis that previously had a default gender have been changed to have an Ambiguous Gender; keyboards use a new sequence of characters to produce the old version.
• "The Scream" Parody: 😱 🙀
• Shout-Out:
  • 🖖 references S.P.O.C.K's Vulcan salute.
  • 👨🏼‍🎤 and 👩🏼‍🎤 are inspired by David Bowie's Aladdin Sane album cover.
  • 🕴️ was originally a character named Walt Jabsco from The Specials' album covers, who ended up in the Webdings font which is how it came to emoji.
  • The number on Facebook's pager emoji is the Facebook Customer Support number (without the area code).
• "Silly Me" Gesture: 😜
• Snot Bubble: 😪
• Superhero: 🦸
• Sweat Drop: 😅 😓 😰 💦
• Symbol Swearing: 🤬
• Tengu: 👺
• Talking Poo: 💩 (though it doesn't actually talk)
• Thinking Tic: 🤔
• V-Sign: ✌
• Waterfall Puke: 🤮
• Wingding Eyes: 😍 😻 (love), 😵 (dead), 😵‍💫 (dizzy), 🤑 (rich), 🤩 (star-struck)
• Wipe That Smile Off Your Face: 🤐
• Your Head A-Splode: 🤯

Trivia ❓

• Banned in China: Since China doesn't recognize Taiwan, the Taiwanese flag emoji (🇹🇼) is blocked there. This has caused some problems with Apple's iOS, causing some phones to crash when it's displayed.
• Follow the Leader: Apple started rendering the Pistol emoji (🔫) as a toy gun in 2016, and soon the other major platforms followed suit.
• No Export for You: Flag emojis are unavailable on Windows platforms, and trying to display or insert country flags there only shows letters from respective countries. (They will still show up on apps and services such as Discord, which have their own design sets embedded.)

YMMV ⛽

• It's Popular, Now It Sucks!: It's not hard to find a person online who refuses to use emojis because of how ubiquitous they are, not helped by all the shoddy merchandise made of them.
• Memetic Molester: 🌚🌚🌚 I'm gonna molest you!
• Memetic Mutation:
  • 🅱 is often used as a letter substitute.
  • Variations of 😂 are used to represent insanity.
  • 🤔 and variations thereof are commonly used to represent confusion or to throw shade on others.
  • Using 👏 the 👏 clapping 👏 emoji 👏 for 👏 emphasis!
  • 👇📺🤠📺👇👢👢 howdy. i'm the sheriff of troperville^note The sheriff is usually arranged like this
  • Some emojis are used to represent Internet memes: 😾^note Grumpy Cat, 🐧^note Socially awkward penguin, 🐸^note Pepe the Frog, 🐸☕️^note But That's None of My Business, 🦀^note The "Crab Rave" meme
  • 🤣,😭, 😳, 🤨, and 💀 are the most common memetic reactions.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: On Twitter, emojis are often placed in one's handle or profile summary to make a political point or make fun of the other side.
  • In the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. election, two factions of left-leaning American politics engaged in the Liberal Twitter Emoji War. The socialist left (🌹) would use 🌽 to make fun of the centrist left, which would use 🥀 and 🍩 to make fun of the socialist left.
  • Right-leaning Twitter also has its own emojis. The flag of one's country (e.g. 🇺🇸 or 🇬🇧) often shows pride in one's country. Reports that Twitter was "shadow-banning" conservative accounts prompted some to put ❌ in their handles. The Frog emoji (🐸) is used by the far-right to evoke the Pepe the Frog meme.
  • Efforts to make emojis more inclusive get a lot of political heat. Efforts to add a Hijab emoji and make a salad more vegan is viewed by some as Political Overcorrectness, while others view them as long overdue.

Emojis are used in the following works:

Advertising 💰

• Deadpool (2016) had billboards which called the movie "💀💩L".
• Durex started a campaign to get Unicode to create a Condom emoji.
• This commercial for McDonald's takes place in a world where everyone's head is an emoji which changes with their mood.
• The South Carolina Department of Public Safety put up emoji billboards in 2016 to combat drunk driving.
• The World Wildlife Fund started the #EndangeredEmoji campaign to support 17 emojis depicting endangered species.

Comic Strips 📰

• Zits has a couple strips which discuss emojis, most of which discuss Jeremy's texting habits and his parents struggling to use or understand them.

Films — Animation 🎦

• The Emoji Movie is pretty much Exactly What It Says on the Tin. The film mostly takes place in a smartphone and most of the characters are emojis.

Literature 📖

• Emoji Dick is a crowd-sourced translation of Moby-Dick into emojis.
• Dictionaries have started adding emojis as entries. Oxford Dictionaries even named the "Face with Tears of Joy" emoji the Word of the Year in 2015.
• Rowley Jefferson's Awesome Friendly Spooky Stories uses emojis in The Scanner. After everyone turns into skeletons because of the scanner, they use the skeleton emoji, but the emoji has no expression so nobody can tell what emotion they're trying to express.

Live-Action TV 📺

• Ellen DeGeneres made fun of some of the emojis on her show.

Music 🎵

• "Emoji" by Brooklyn Queen has the singer asking the audience to send her various emojis.
• In the music video for Galantis' song "Emoji", the main character gets a package with a heart emoji.
• Big Data has a lyric video appropriately titled "The Business of Emoji".

Stand-Up Comedy 🎭

• Iliza Shlesinger: Played for Laughs in Freezing Hot, in response to a Bad Date who sent her a surreally underwhelming text message afterwards:
  "You send me something that stupid, I'm not giving you the dignity of a normal text back. You're not even getting back a regular emoji. No winky face, no sad face. I'm going deep into the emoji bank and I am pulling out... fried shrimp."

Video Games 🎮

• Disney Emoji Blitz is a video game featuring emojis modeled after Disney characters.
• Emoji.io is a Maze Game which has emojis eating other emojis.
• The Tree of Nerfs 2: The AB layer has you collect reactions to your messages from people using 🆎 emojis.

Webcomics 💬

• In one strip of Dinosaur Comics, T-Rex and Utahraptor propose new emojis, ranging from the Batman emoji to the "straight-up sex emoji".
• xkcd has made a running gag of Emoji (and by extension, Unicode) ever since their inception, such as having a Magic 8-Ball that gives answers in Emoji, making "new sports" with Emoji, and of course, the idea of the vomit modifier.

Web Original 🖥️

• Emojipedia is a reference dedicated to documenting emojis.
• The Rotten Tomatoes critics' concensus for The Emoji Movie is "🚫".
• The Wattpad user YarnStore made a story using emojis and punctuation.
• At least a few lines of The Canterbury Tales have been translated into emoji.
• Homestar Runner: The short "Squintmojis" parodies the phenomenon, as it's devoted to combining emojis in ways that makes them look vaguely like characters from the website, like combining the bathtub, siren, and sake bottle emojis to form Homestar, or a saxophone, a human ear, and a pink purse to form "'Moji-pan".
  Strong Bad: Are you tired of people using -moji as a legitimate suffix? Neith-moji are we-moji!

Web Video 📱

• Brizzy Voices made a video suggesting what the emojis sound like.
• DavidParody tried to recreate various emojis and did emoji facepainting with WolfieRaps.
• Disney has its As Told By Emoji" series, which recreates various Disney movies with customized emojis.
• Jacksfilms:
  • He spent most of 2017 ironically hyping The Emoji Movie. Before it was released, he changed his Twitter profile picture into his own emoji based on the movie's main character.
  • After the movie was released, he gathered with his friends and fiance to guess which movies are depicted by various emojis.
  • In a parody video, he joked that the iPhone X is actually a "$1000 emoji machine", citing its new animoji feature.
• The Filipino YouTube kids' channel Keira Charma does the "emoji challenge", where the two kids try to recreate emoji and clip-art expressions.
• Molly Mulshine made the video "Real Life Emoji", which depicts texting with emojis as an actual conversation.