Emoji Picker

What is on the board

Nine tabs hold 1,164 tiles in total: Smileys 119, People 148, Animals 115, Food 116, Activities 86, Travel 108, Objects 137, Symbols 222 and Flags 113. A handful of characters appear in more than one tab, which is deliberate, since a sports emoji is reasonable to look for under either Activities or Objects.

Clicking a tile writes that character to your clipboard through the browser's clipboard API and adds it to the recent row. Search terms and clicks stay inside the page, so nothing you look for leaves your device.

One caveat on copying: the clipboard API needs a secure connection and an active tab. If no confirmation appears, highlight the character and copy it manually.

One code point, many different faces

The single most common surprise with emoji is that the picture you send is not the picture that arrives.

What you actually copy is a code point, an abstract number. The artwork comes from whatever emoji font the receiving device has installed. Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung all ship their own designs, and web apps sometimes substitute a fourth set of their own. The same character can look cheerful in one and pained in another, which is how disagreements about what a face means get started.

There is a second, larger gap. Unicode adds new emoji regularly, and devices only gain them when the operating system updates. Send a recently added emoji to a phone that has not been updated for a few years and it will show a placeholder box rather than an image, because the character is valid but the font has no glyph for it. The claim that an emoji always displays correctly everywhere is not true, and it fails most often on older devices and unusual platforms.

Sequences, and why some emoji split apart

Plenty of entries on this board are not a single character at all. They are short sequences that platforms are expected to draw as one image.

Flags are the clearest case. 🇦🇺 is not a flag character. It is the letters A and U written as regional indicator symbols, and the operating system is expected to recognise the pair and draw the flag. Windows has historically not shipped flag artwork, so the same text appears there as two boxed letters reading AU. Nothing is broken, the platform simply declines to draw it.

Then there are zero width joiner sequences. The rainbow flag is a white flag, an invisible joiner and a rainbow, stitched into one image. The pirate flag is a black flag joined to a skull and crossbones. If a device does not know the sequence, it falls back to displaying the pieces in a row, which is why someone occasionally receives a flag followed by a separate rainbow.

The keycap digits work the same way: 7️⃣ is the ordinary digit 7, a variation selector and a combining enclosing keycap. Three characters, one picture.

Skin tones and what this picker copies

Unicode defines five skin tone modifiers, based on the Fitzpatrick scale, which attach to most human emoji and change the rendered tone. A hand or figure emoji followed by one of those modifiers becomes a single tinted image.

This picker does not offer modifiers. Every human emoji here copies in its default form, which most platforms render as the neutral yellow. If you need a specific tone, use your operating system's own emoji panel, which does provide the selector, and paste from there.

Worth knowing either way: a modified emoji is two code points, so it counts as more characters in a field with a length limit, and a platform that does not support the modifier shows the base emoji followed by a colour swatch.

Getting the most out of search and recents

The search box filters on a keyword list rather than on official Unicode names, and that list covers about 220 of the most commonly wanted emoji. Typing fire, thumbs up, laughing or australia will find them. Typing a rarer term may return nothing even though the emoji is sitting in one of the tabs, so when a search comes up empty, browse the category instead.

The recent row keeps your last sixteen picks in your browser's local storage. It is per browser and per device, so it will not follow you to your phone, and clearing site data or using a private window will empty it.

Where a web picker beats the built in one

On a desktop the operating system panel is often several keystrokes away, and in some apps it will not open at all over a web text field. A browser tab you can leave open is quicker.

Spreadsheets are a good example. Status columns with ✅ and ❌ stay sortable and export cleanly, which coloured cell fills do not. Just be aware that an emoji in a cell is text, so it affects sorting order.

Email subject lines, calendar event titles, folder names and document headings all accept emoji, and all suffer from the same font coverage caveat when they leave your machine. In code, emoji in comments and commit messages are fine on modern toolchains, but in string literals and identifiers they are best avoided because the byte length and the visible length no longer match.

For decoration that inherits your text colour rather than rendering as a picture, try the Aesthetic Symbols board. The Kaomoji page has text faces that need no emoji font at all, and the Invisible Character tool covers blank characters for spacing.

Common questions

Why does an emoji I sent look completely different on their phone?

Because their device drew it with a different emoji font. The character you sent is identical, but each platform draws its own artwork, and the same face can carry a different expression from one design to another.

Why do flags show as two letters on Windows?

Flag emoji are pairs of regional indicator letters that the system is meant to combine into an image. Windows has not shipped country flag artwork, so it displays the letter pair instead. The text is correct and will show as a flag on platforms that do include the images.

My search found nothing, but I can see the emoji in a tab. Why?

Search matches a keyword list that covers the most requested emoji rather than every tile on the board. If your term is not on that list the grid comes back empty. Clearing the box and browsing the category tab always works.

Can I pick a skin tone here?

Not on this page. All human emoji copy in their default form. Your device's own emoji keyboard or panel includes a tone selector if you need one.

Where does the recent row come from and can I clear it?

It is stored locally in the browser you are using and holds the last sixteen emoji you copied. Clearing your browsing data for this site removes it, and it never syncs to another device.