Emoji Keyboard

Two ways to copy

One at a time: click an emoji and it is on your clipboard immediately. Paste it wherever you were typing. This is the fast path and it is what most visits need.

Several at once: click a few emoji to build them up in the box at the top, then press Copy. You can type text in that box too, around the emoji, and copy the whole line together.

The box is an ordinary text field, so the cursor matters — emoji are inserted where you left it, not always at the end. Click into the middle of what you have collected and the next emoji lands there.

Searching by name

Search matches each emoji's official Unicode name and its keywords, so "heart" finds the whole family of hearts and "cat" finds both the animal and the cat-faced smileys. Accents are optional: "cafe" finds the same results as "café".

Several words narrow rather than widen. "heart" returns dozens; "red heart" returns the few that are both. That is usually the quickest way to the one you had in mind.

The names come from the Unicode CLDR data in the language of the page, which is why the German page responds to "herz" and the Indonesian page to "hati". Sixteen emoji added in the most recent Unicode release do not have names in that data yet; they are in the grid, but search cannot find them by word.

Categories and recently used

The nine category tabs are the standard Unicode groups: smileys and emotion, people and body, animals and nature, food and drink, travel and places, activities, objects, symbols, and flags. Showing one at a time keeps the grid quick even on an older phone.

Whatever you click is added to a "recently used" row at the top, up to forty emoji. That row is stored in your own browser and nowhere else, so it follows you between visits on that device but is invisible to everyone else. The Clear button next to it empties it.

Where emoji show up differently

An emoji is a character, not a picture, so what you paste is drawn by the device that displays it. The same code point looks different on an iPhone, on Android and on Windows — same meaning, different drawing.

Very new emoji are the ones to be careful with. If a friend's phone has not had the system update that added an emoji, they will see an empty box where you see the symbol. The older and more common the emoji, the safer it is.

Some emoji are sequences of several characters joined together — a flag, a family, an emoji with a skin tone. Those paste correctly everywhere that understands the sequence, and fall back to the separate pieces where that is not supported.