Articles about emoji
Long reads: how the standard works, where the characters come from, what they mean and why they look different on every device.
- What order emoji are in — and why 😀 always comes first The emoji panel on your phone is sorted neither alphabetically nor by popularity. It is one numbered list from Unicode: 3,953 symbols, positions 1 to 3,953, ten sections running back to back without a single gap. We look at why people take up sixty-one per cent of the list, what nine coloured blobs are doing in the middle of it, and where emoji versions 6.0 to 10.0 went.
- Where an emoji gets its name — and why it has four of them The 😂 emoji has a name in the standard, a human name in nine languages, the code :joy: for chats, and whatever people actually call it in a message. All four disagree with one another, and that is by design rather than by oversight. We take it apart using catalogue data: 35,577 names, 374 former names and exactly one Cyrillic “ё” in the whole CLDR dictionary.
- Why searching for an emoji is a hard problem A catalogue of 3953 entries sounds easy to search. Yet 423 entries answer to the word «hand», the Spanish dictionary averages 4.5 keywords per entry against 7.7 in English, and 269 Danish entries have no keywords at all. Here is what emoji search actually trips over.
- Why the same emoji looks different everywhere The standard fixes what a symbol means, never how it is drawn. Three open image sets sit on our disk covering the same 3953 catalogue entries: 30.6 MiB, 12.3 MiB and 9.6 MiB. Here is where the threefold gap comes from, and where the sets have holes.
- Why an emoji has two version numbers, and which one matters Every symbol page shows two numbers: the Unicode version and the Emoji version. On 2845 of 3953 entries they differ. Where the two counters came from, why they merged in 2018, and which one decides whether your reader sees the symbol at all.
- Symbols that never became emoji: 3052 signs on the other side of the line Chess pieces, runes, musical notes, hieroglyphs and fractions live in the same Unicode as emoji, yet never turned into pictures. Where the line actually runs, why it rests on one invisible character, and why 840 of these signs are seventeen years older than emoji.
- How a composite emoji is built: the invisible joiner, skin tones and gender More than two thirds of the catalogue is written not as one character but as a chain. The mechanics of joining, measured against our own database: how many characters go into one glyph, where the five skin tones came from, and why whole releases of the standard consist of nothing but combinations.
- Why an emoji shows up as a square — and when it stops The character exists in the standard, but your phone cannot draw it. Where the gap comes from, how long it lasts by release dates, and what to do about it.
