About Pick Emoji
What this site is, how it is built, and where its data comes from
Pick Emoji is a reference site for the emoji in the Unicode Standard: what each one is called, which codepoint it maps to, which release added it, and what it means. It indexes 3963 emoji across 18 emoji-version releases, from the earliest emoji Unicode standardised through the newest.
What's on a page
Every emoji has its own page: its name, its codepoint, the shortcodes different platforms use
for it (GitHub's :pizza:, Slack's, CLDR's), its CLDR keywords and a short factual
description. Where an emoji has skin-tone variants, they're linked together; where emoji are
related in other ways, those are linked too.
Beyond individual emoji, you can browse by category, jump to everything added in a specific emoji version, or look at one artwork set's coverage and licence on its own page.
How emoji are drawn here
The pictures on this site are bundled artwork, not your device's font: five open-licence sets — Twemoji, Noto Emoji, OpenMoji, Fluent Emoji and Blobmoji — are served from this origin, so the same page shows you the same drawings on an iPhone, an Android phone and a Windows desktop. Twemoji is the set every listing and every page heading uses; each emoji's page puts all five side by side, and says plainly where a set has not drawn one.
What you copy is never the picture. The Copy button hands over the Unicode character itself, as plain text that pastes anywhere text is accepted — and once pasted, it is drawn by whatever emoji font the reader's device has, which is not necessarily any of these five. Each emoji's page has a panel showing what your own device makes of it.
Where the data comes from
The emoji list itself is built from Unicode's own emoji-test.txt, layered with
keyword and shortcode data from the emojibase-data project. This site also
redistributes five artwork sets that permit it under an open licence — Twemoji, Noto Emoji,
OpenMoji, Fluent Emoji and Blobmoji — each of which has its own page here describing what it
draws. Full credit, with the licence for each, is on the Licenses
page.
What this site is not
Pick Emoji does not create emoji, does not propose new ones to Unicode, and is not affiliated with the Unicode Consortium or with any of the artwork sets' makers. It is an independent reference built on top of publicly available, openly licensed data and artwork.