What order emoji are in — and why 😀 always comes first

Open the emoji panel on your phone and scroll it all the way to the end. The order the symbols come in is not alphabetical, not by popularity, and not shaped by your habits: yellow faces first, then an endless run of people, then some baffling coloured blobs in the middle, and flags right at the tail. Neither Apple nor Google invented that order.

It is a single numbered list maintained by Unicode. Our catalogue reproduces it end to end: each of the 3,953 symbols has a position, from 1 to 3,953, and there is not one gap between them. Position one is 😀. Position 3,953 is 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿, the flag of Wales. Everything else sits between them in a strictly determined place.

The order looks like a detail right up to the moment you cannot find the symbol you want. That is when you discover that the position decides what catches your eye first and what has to be dug out. So let us take the list apart.

Ten shelves, laid out back to back

The list is split into ten sections, and the sections do not interleave: each occupies an unbroken run of positions. No smiley has slipped in among the animals, no flag has floated up into the food.

Look down the right-hand column: nine sections out of ten together take up less than forty per cent of the list. Everything else is people.

People are sixty-one per cent of the catalogue

2,418 records out of 3,953 belong to people and body. That does not mean humanity invented fifteen times more gestures and occupations than there are animals. It means human figures multiply.

The catalogue holds 1,744 standalone symbols. The remaining 2,209 are variants of ones already there: the same gesture in another skin tone, the same job in a female and a male reading, the same couple in another combination. It splits along two axes at once:

• by skin tone: 1,918 records carry no tone at all, and each of the five tones accounts for exactly 407 records — 2,035 in total;
• by gender: 605 female variants, 605 male and 2,743 neutral;
• and separately, 380 records carry two skin tones at once — couples holding hands and kissing, where each figure is coloured independently.

Exactly 407 per tone is not a coincidence but a rule: if a figure has a skin tone, it has all five, otherwise one tone would end up privileged. There is a separate piece on skin tones that goes into it.

The catalogue does not reflect the world, it reflects combinatorics. One new human gesture adds not one record to the list but five, ten or thirty.

A hundred subgroups: shelves within shelves

Inside the sections there is a second level — subgroups, exactly one hundred of them. They are what sets the fine-grained order: why every cat face comes in one batch rather than scattered among the ordinary ones.

Subgroup sizes differ catastrophically:

The top row deserves saying out loud: the single subgroup of occupations and roles — 492 symbols — is nearly three times the whole smileys and emotion section put together. And the catalogue's entire amphibian population is one frog.

There are twice as many worried faces as smiling ones

The smileys section is the smallest of the substantive ones, 171 symbols, and the order inside it reads like a list of moods. It opens with smiles, then affection, tongues, hands at the face, scepticism, sleepiness, feeling unwell — and only then anxiety.

Fourteen smiles. Twenty-seven worried, bewildered and crying faces — nearly double. That is not an editorial choice but a consequence of how the list grew: a smile was covered by a handful of variants, while shades of distress are what people kept asking to have added.

Nine symbols in the middle of the catalogue

Positions 2590 to 2598 hold the strangest shelf in the catalogue. Nine records that mean nothing on their own:

• 2590—2594 — five skin tones: 🏻 🏼 🏽 🏾 🏿;
• 2595—2598 — four hairstyles: red, curly and white hair, and baldness.

You can put one of these into a message by itself, but the result is nonsense: a coloured rectangle, or a lock of hair with no head attached. These nine exist not to be read but to be assembled — they are glued onto a human figure, and out comes the skin-tone variant. How that gluing works is covered in our piece on how composite emoji are built.

Version 5.0 is followed straight by 11.0

Every record also has a year of birth: the version number it first appeared in. Laid out by version, the catalogue tells a fairly abrupt story.

One hole in the table jumps out: versions 6.0 through 10.0 do not exist at all. That is not a gap in our data. Until 2018 the emoji set was numbered on its own count and the letters of the standard on another, and the two numberings drifted apart. They were brought back together: the next release was numbered 11.0 so as to match the eleventh version of Unicode. The five intermediate versions never existed.

The other conspicuous row is 4.0 with its 598 records. Few new symbols went into that release; it swelled because that was when occupations and activities acquired female and male readings all at once. The same mechanism — one new concept turning into dozens of records — still operates today: the latest release brought eight new concepts, and the catalogue grew by 163 records.

Flags at the end, and three of them are not countries

The tail of the catalogue is 270 flags, and they are not of one kind:

1. 259 are flags of countries and territories, assembled from a pair of letter symbols;
2. 8 are general-purpose flags: white, black, chequered, pirate and the like;
3. 3 are regional flags: England, Scotland and Wales.

That last trio closes the list. Position 3,950 is Zimbabwe, the last country alphabetically; then come 3,951 England, 3,952 Scotland and 3,953 Wales. They landed at the very end not by importance but because they are assembled differently: not from a two-letter country code but from a long run of service characters, and in the list such sequences come after the ordinary ones.

What a reader should do with all this

The catalogue order is a tool, provided you know where it helps and where it gets in the way:

1. Looking for an emotion? Go to the start of the list — the first 171 positions cover almost every mood there is.
2. Looking for a person? Do not scroll straight through: you will never get past 2,418 records, and one gesture sits there in ten variants. Find the base symbol; tone and gender are chosen afterwards.
3. If you remember what the symbol is called, you do not need the order at all: the A-to-Z index is built on names rather than positions.
4. If you want to see everything at once, the flat list shows the catalogue in exactly the order this article is about.
5. If you want a symbol people actually use, the order is no help whatsoever — it was drawn up with no regard for frequency. That is what the hundred most common is for.

One last observation captures the whole business. The 😂 symbol — the most-used emoji in the world — sits at position eight. Not because it is the most used, but because it fell into the first subgroup of smiles back in the original 2010 set and has not moved since. The list is sorted by history rather than by life, and that is worth remembering every time it feels as though your symbol has been hidden away somewhere. Nothing was hidden — its neighbours simply turned out to be other than you expected. Building your own, more convenient neighbourhood is what the emoji keyboard page is for.