Unicode® Technical Standard #51

Unicode Emoji

Summary

This document defines the structure of Unicode emoji characters and sequences, and provides data to support that structure, such as which characters are considered to be emoji, which emoji should be displayed by default with a text style versus an emoji style, and which can be displayed with a variety of skin tones. It also provides design guidelines for improving the interoperability of emoji characters across platforms and implementations.

Starting with Version 11.0 of this specification, the repertoire of emoji characters is synchronized with the Unicode Standard, and has the same version numbering system. For details, see Section 1.5.2 Versioning.

Status

This document has been reviewed by Unicode members and other interested parties, and has been approved for publication by the Unicode Consortium. This is a stable document and may be used as reference material or cited as a normative reference by other specifications.

A Unicode Technical Standard (UTS) is an independent specification. Conformance to the Unicode Standard does not imply conformance to any UTS.

Please submit corrigenda and other comments with the online reporting form [Feedback]. Related information that is useful in understanding this document is found in the References. For the latest version of the Unicode Standard, see [Unicode]. For a list of current Unicode Technical Reports, see [Reports]. For more information about versions of the Unicode Standard, see [Versions].

Contents

• 1 Introduction
  • Table: Emoji Proposals
  • Table: Major Sources
  • 1.1 Emoticons and Emoji
  • 1.2 Encoding Considerations
  • 1.3 Goals
  • 1.4 Definitions
    • 1.4.1 Emoji Characters
    • 1.4.2 Emoji Presentation
    • 1.4.3 Emoji and Text Presentation Sequences
    • 1.4.4 Emoji Modifiers
    • 1.4.5 Emoji Sequences
    • 1.4.6 Emoji Sets
    • 1.4.7 Notation
    • 1.4.8 Property Stability
    • 1.4.9 EBNF and Regex
  • 1.5 Conformance
    • Table: Emoji Capabilities
    • 1.5.1 Collation Conformance
    • 1.5.2 Versioning
• 2 Design Guidelines
  • 2.1 Gender
    • 2.1.1 Gender-Neutral Emoji
  • 2.2 Diversity
    • Table: Emoji Modifiers
    • 2.2.1 Multi-Person Groupings
    • 2.2.2 Implementations
      • Table: Sample Emoji Modifier Bases
      • Table: Expected Emoji Modifiers Display
    • 2.2.3 Emoji Modifiers in Text
      • Table: Minipalettes
  • 2.3 Emoji ZWJ Sequences
    • Table: ZWJ Sequence Display
  • 2.4 Emoji Implementation Notes
    • 2.4.1 Emoji and Text Presentation Selectors
    • 2.4.2 Handling Tag Characters
  • 2.5 Emoji Glyph Facing Direction
  • 2.6 Hair Components
  • 2.7 Order of Emoji ZWJ Sequences
• 3 Which Characters are Emoji
  • Table: Emoji Counts
• 4 Presentation Style
  • Table: Emoji vs Text Display
  • 4.1 Emoji and Text Presentation Selectors
  • 4.2 Emoji Locale Extension
  • 4.3 Emoji Script
  • 4.4 Other Approaches for Control of Emoji Presentation
• 5 Ordering and Grouping
• 6 Input
  • Table: Palette Input
• 7 Searching
• 8 Longer Term Solutions
• Annex A: Emoji Properties and Data Files
  • Table: Emoji Properties
  • A.1 A.1 Data Files
• Annex B: Valid Emoji Flag Sequences
  • B.1 Presentation
  • B.2 Ordering
• Annex C. Valid Emoji Tag Sequences
  • C.1 Flag Emoji Tag Sequences
    • C.1.1 Sample Valid Emoji Tag Sequences
    • C.1.2 Sample Invalid Emoji Tag Sequences
    • C.1.3 Sample Ill-formed Emoji Tag Sequences
• Acknowledgments
• Rights to Emoji Images
• References
• Modifications

1 Introduction

Emoji are pictographs (pictorial symbols) that are typically presented in a colorful cartoon form and used inline in text. They represent things such as faces, weather, vehicles and buildings, food and drink, animals and plants, or icons that represent emotions, feelings, or activities.

Emoji on smartphones and in chat and email applications have become extremely popular worldwide. As of March 2015, for example, Instagram reported that “nearly half of text [on Instagram] contained emoji.” Individual emoji also vary greatly in popularity (and even by country), as described in the SwiftKey Emoji Report. See emoji press page for details about these reports and others.

Emoji are most often used in quick, short social media messages, where they connect with the reader and add flavor, color, and emotion. Emoji do not have the grammar or vocabulary to substitute for written language. In social media, emoji make up for the lack of gestures, facial expressions, and intonation that are found in speech. They also add useful ambiguity to messages, allowing the writer to convey many different possible concepts at the same time. Many people are also attracted by the challenge of composing messages in emoji, and puzzling out emoji messages.

The word emoji comes from the Japanese:

絵 (e ≅ picture) 文字 (moji ≅ written character).

Emoji may be represented internally as graphics or they may be represented by normal glyphs encoded in fonts like other characters. These latter are called emoji characters for clarity. Some Unicode characters are normally displayed as emoji; some are normally displayed as ordinary text, and some can be displayed both ways.

There’s been considerable media attention to emoji since they appeared in the Unicode Standard, with increased attention starting in late 2013. For example, there were some 6,000 articles on the emoji appearing in Unicode 7.0, according to Google News. See the emoji press page for many samples of such articles, and also the Keynote from the 38th Internationalization & Unicode Conference.

Emoji became available in 1999 on Japanese mobile phones. There was an early proposal in 2000 to encode DoCoMo emoji in the Unicode standard. At that time, it was unclear whether these characters would come into widespread use—and there was not support from the Japanese mobile phone carriers to add them to Unicode—so no action was taken.

The emoji turned out to be quite popular in Japan, but each mobile phone carrier developed different (but partially overlapping) sets, and each mobile phone vendor used their own text encoding extensions, which were incompatible with one another. The vendors developed cross-mapping tables to allow limited interchange of emoji characters with phones from other vendors, including email. Characters from other platforms that could not be displayed were represented with 〓 (U+3013 GETA MARK), but it was all too easy for the characters to get corrupted or dropped.

When non-Japanese email and mobile phone vendors started to support email exchange with the Japanese carriers, they ran into those problems. Moreover, there was no way to represent these characters in Unicode, which was the basis for text in all modern programs. In 2006, Google started work on converting Japanese emoji to Unicode private-use codes, leading to the development of internal mapping tables for supporting the carrier emoji via Unicode characters in 2007.

There are, however, many problems with a private-use approach, and thus a proposal was made to the Unicode Consortium to expand the scope of symbols to encompass emoji. This proposal was approved in May 2007, leading to the formation of a symbols subcommittee, and in August 2007 the technical committee agreed to support the encoding of emoji in Unicode based on a set of principles developed by the subcommittee. The following are a few of the documents tracking the progression of Unicode emoji characters.

Emoji Proposals

To find the documents in this table, see UTC Documents.

In 2009, the first Unicode characters explicitly intended as emoji were added to Unicode 5.2 for interoperability with the ARIB (Association of Radio Industries and Businesses) set. A set of 722 characters was defined as the union of emoji characters used by Japanese mobile phone carriers: 114 of these characters were already in Unicode 5.2. In 2010, the remaining 608 emoji characters were added to Unicode 6.0, along with some other emoji characters. In 2012, a few more emoji were added to Unicode 6.1, and in 2014 a larger number were added to Unicode 7.0. Additional characters have been added since then, based on the Selection Factors found in Submitting Emoji Character Proposals.

Here is a summary of when some of the major sources of pictographs used as emoji were encoded in Unicode. Each source may include other characters in addition to emoji, and Unicode characters can correspond to multiple sources. The L column contains single-letter abbreviations of the various sources for use in charts [emoji-charts] and data files [emoji-data]. Characters that do not correspond to any of these sources can be marked with Other (x).

Major Sources

Source	Abbr	L	Dev. Starts	Released	Unicode Version	Sample Character
						B&W	Color	Code	CLDR Short Name
Zapf Dingbats	ZDings	z	1989	1991-10	1.0			U+270F	pencil
ARIB	ARIB	a	2007	2008-10-01	5.2			U+2614	umbrella with rain drops
Japanese carriers	JCarrier	j	2007	2010-10-11	6.0			U+1F60E	smiling face with sunglasses
Wingdings & Webdings	WDings	w	2010	2014-06-16	7.0			U+1F336	hot pepper

For a detailed view of when various source sets of emoji were added to Unicode, see Emoji Version Sources [emoji-charts]. The data file [JSources] shows the correspondence to the original Japanese carrier symbols.

People often ask how many emoji are in the Unicode Standard. This question does not have a simple answer, because there is no clear line separating which pictographic characters should be displayed with a typical emoji style. For a complete picture, see Which Characters are Emoji.

The colored images used in this document and associated charts [emoji-charts] are for illustration only. They do not appear in the Unicode Standard, which has only black and white images. They are either made available by the respective vendors for use in this document, or are believed to be available for non-commercial reuse. Inquiries for permission to use vendor images should be directed to those vendors, not to the Unicode Consortium. For more information, see Rights to Emoji Images.

1.1 Emoticons and Emoji

The term emoticon refers to a series of text characters (typically punctuation or symbols) that is meant to represent a facial expression or gesture (sometimes when viewed sideways), such as the following.

;-)

Emoticons predate Unicode and emoji, but were later adapted to include Unicode characters. The following examples use not only ASCII characters, but also U+203F ( ‿ ), U+FE35 ( ︵ ), U+25C9 ( ◉ ), and U+0CA0 ( ಠ ).

^‿^

◉︵◉

ಠ_ಠ

Often implementations allow emoticons to be used to input emoji. For example, the emoticon ;-) can be mapped to in a chat window. The term emoticon is sometimes used in a broader sense, to also include the emoji for facial expressions and gestures. That broad sense is used in the Unicode block name Emoticons, covering the code points from U+1F600 to U+1F64F.

1.2 Encoding Considerations

Unicode is the foundation for text in all modern software: it’s how all mobile phones, desktops, and other computers represent the text of every language. People are using Unicode every time they type a key on their phone or desktop computer, and every time they look at a web page or text in an application. It is very important that the standard be stable, and that every character that goes into it be scrutinized carefully. This requires a formal process with a long development cycle. For example, the dark sunglasses character was first proposed years before it was released in Unicode 7.0.

Characters considered for encoding must normally be in widespread use as elements of text. The emoji and various symbols were added to Unicode because of their use as characters for text-messaging in a number of Japanese manufacturers’ corporate standards, and other places, or in long-standing use in widely distributed fonts such as Wingdings and Webdings. In many cases, the characters were added for complete round-tripping to and from a source set, not because they were inherently of more importance than other characters. For example, the clamshell phone character was included because it was in Wingdings and Webdings, not because it is more important than, say, a “skunk” character.

In some cases, a character was added to complete a set: for example, a rugby football character was added to Unicode 6.0 to complement the american football character (the soccer ball had been added back in Unicode 5.2). Similarly, a mechanism was added that could be used to represent all country flags (those corresponding to a two-letter unicode_region_subtag), such as the flag for Canada, even though the Japanese carrier set only had 10 country flags.

The data does not include non-pictographs, except for those in Unicode that are used to represent characters from emoji sources, for compatibility, such as:

or

Game pieces, such as the dominos (🀰 🀱 🀲 ... 🂑 🂒), are currently not included as emoji, with the exceptions of U+1F0CF ( ) PLAYING CARD BLACK JOKER and U+1F004 (  ) MAHJONG TILE RED DRAGON. These are included because they correspond each to an emoji character from one of the carrier sets.

The selection factors used to weigh the encoding of prospective candidates are found in Selection Factors in Submitting Emoji Character Proposals. That document also provides instructions for submitting proposals for new emoji.

For a list of frequently asked questions on emoji, see the Unicode Emoji FAQ.

1.3 Goals

This document provides:

• design guidelines for improving interoperability across platforms and implementations
• background information about emoji characters, and long-term alternatives
• data indicating:
  • which characters normally can be considered to be emoji
  • which emoji characters should be displayed by default in text style versus emoji style
  • which emoji characters may be displayed using a variety of skin tones, with implementation details
• pointers to [CLDR] data for
  • sorting emoji characters more naturally
  • annotations for searching and grouping emoji characters

It also provides background information about emoji, and discusses longer-term approaches to emoji.

As new Unicode characters are added or the “common practice” for emoji usage changes, the data and recommendations supplied by this document may change in accordance. Thus the recommendations and data will change across versions of this document.

1.4 Definitions

The following provide more formal definitions of some of the terms used in this document. Readers who are more interested in other features of the document may choose to continue from Section 2 Design Guidelines.

ED-1. emoji — A colorful pictograph that can be used inline in text. Internally the representation is either (a) an image or (b) an encoded character. The term emoji character can be used for (b) where not clear from context.

ED-2. emoticon — (1) A series of text characters (typically punctuation or symbols) that is meant to represent a facial expression or gesture such as ;-) (2) in a broader sense, also includes emoji for facial expressions and gestures.

1.4.1 Emoji Characters

ED-3. emoji character — A character that has the Emoji property. These characters are recommended for use as emoji.

emoji_character := \p{Emoji}

• These characters have the Emoji property. See Annex A: Emoji Properties and Data Files.

ED-4. extended pictographic character — a character that has the Extended_Pictographic property. These characters are pictographic, or otherwise similar in kind to characters with the Emoji property.

• These characters have the Extended_Pictographic property. See Annex A: Emoji Properties and Data Files.
• The Extended_Pictographic property is used to customize segmentation (as described in [UAX29] and [UAX14]) so that possible future emoji zwj sequences will not break grapheme clusters, words, or lines. Unassigned codepoints with Line_Break=ID in some blocks are also assigned the Extended_Pictographic property. Those blocks are intended for future allocation of emoji characters.

ED-5. (This definition has been removed.)

For more information, see Section 3 Which Characters are Emoji.

1.4.2 Emoji Presentation

ED-6. default emoji presentation character — A character that, by default, should appear with an emoji presentation, rather than a text presentation.

default_emoji_presentation_character := \p{Emoji_Presentation}

• These characters have the Emoji_Presentation property. See Annex A: Emoji Properties and Data Files.

ED-7. default text presentation character — A character that, by default, should appear with a text presentation, rather than an emoji presentation.

default_text_presentation_character := \P{Emoji_Presentation}

• These characters do not have the Emoji_Presentation property; that is, their Emoji_Presentation property value is No. See Annex A: Emoji Properties and Data Files.

For more details about emoji and text presentation, see Section 2 Design Guidelines and Section 4 Presentation Style.

1.4.3 Emoji and Text Presentation Sequences

ED-8. text presentation selector — The character U+FE0E VARIATION SELECTOR-15 (VS15), used to request a text presentation for an emoji character. (Also known as text variation selector in prior versions of this specification.)

text_presentation_selector := \x{FE0E}

ED-8a. text presentation sequence — A variation sequence consisting of an emoji character followed by a text presentation selector.

text_presentation_sequence := emoji_character text_presentation_selector

• The only valid text presentation sequences are those listed in emoji-variation-sequences.txt [emoji-data].

ED-9. emoji presentation selector — The character U+FE0F VARIATION SELECTOR-16 (VS16), used to request an emoji presentation for an emoji character. (Also known as emoji variation selector in prior versions of this specification.)

emoji_presentation_selector := \x{FE0F}

ED-9a. emoji presentation sequence — A variation sequence consisting of an emoji character followed by a emoji presentation selector.

emoji_presentation_sequence := emoji_character emoji_presentation_selector

• The only valid emoji presentation sequences are those listed in emoji-variation-sequences.txt [emoji-data].

ED-10. (This definition has been removed.)

1.4.4 Emoji Modifiers

ED-11. emoji modifier — A character that can be used to modify the appearance of a preceding emoji in an emoji modifier sequence.

emoji_modifier := \p{Emoji_Modifier}

• These characters have the Emoji_Modifier property. See Annex A: Emoji Properties and Data Files.

ED-12. emoji modifier base — A character whose appearance can be modified by a subsequent emoji modifier in an emoji modifier sequence.

emoji_modifier_base := \p{Emoji_Modifier_Base}

• These characters have the Emoji_Modifier_Base property. See Annex A: Emoji Properties and Data Files.
• They are also listed in Characters Subject to Emoji Modifiers.

ED-13. emoji modifier sequence — A sequence of the following form:

emoji_modifier_sequence :=
  emoji_modifier_base emoji_modifier

For more details about emoji modifiers, see Section 2.2 Diversity.

1.4.5 Emoji Sequences

ED-14. emoji flag sequence — A sequence of two Regional Indicator characters, where the corresponding ASCII characters are valid region sequences as specified by Unicode region subtags in [CLDR], with idStatus="regular" or "deprecated". See also Annex B: Valid Emoji Flag Sequences. A singleton Regional Indicator character is called an ill-formed emoji flag sequence.

emoji_flag_sequence :=
  regional_indicator regional_indicator

regional_indicator := \p{Regional_Indicator}

ED-14a. emoji tag sequence (ETS) — A sequence of the following form:

emoji_tag_sequence := tag_base tag_spec tag_term
tag_base           := emoji_character
                    | emoji_modifier_sequence
                    | emoji_presentation_sequence
tag_spec           := [\x{E0020}-\x{E007E}]+
tag_term           := \x{E007F}

• The tag_spec consists of all characters from U+E0020 TAG SPACE to U+E007E TAG TILDE. Each tag_spec defines a particular visual variant to be applied to the tag_base character(s). Though tag_spec includes the values U+E0041 TAG LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A .. U+E005A TAG LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z, they are not used currently and are reserved for future extensions.
• The tag_term consists of the character U+E007F CANCEL TAG, and must be used to terminate the sequence.

The meaning and validity criteria for an emoji_tag_sequence and expected visual variants for a tag_spec are determined by Annex C: Valid Emoji Tag Sequences. A sequence of tag characters that is not part of a emoji tag sequence is called an ill-formed emoji tag sequence.

ED-14b. emoji combining sequence — A sequence of the following form:

emoji_combining_sequence :=
( emoji_character | emoji_presentation_sequence | emoji_keycap_sequence )

ED-14c. emoji keycap sequence — A sequence of the following form:

emoji_keycap_sequence := [0-9#*] \x{FE0F 20E3}

• These characters are in the emoji-sequences.txt file listed under the category Emoji_Keycap_Sequence

ED-15. emoji core sequence — A sequence of the following form:

emoji_core_sequence :=
  emoji_combining_sequence
| emoji_modifier_sequence
| emoji_flag_sequence

ED-15a. emoji zwj element — A more limited element that can be used in an emoji ZWJ sequence, as follows:

emoji_zwj_element :=
  emoji_character
| emoji_presentation_sequence
| emoji_modifier_sequence


ED-16. emoji zwj sequence — An emoji sequence with at least one joiner character.

emoji_zwj_sequence :=
  emoji_zwj_element ( ZWJ emoji_zwj_element )+

ZWJ := \x{200d}

ED-17. emoji sequence — A core sequence or ZWJ sequence, as follows:

emoji_sequence :=
  emoji_core_sequence
| emoji_zwj_sequence
| emoji_tag_sequence

ED-18. fully-qualified emoji zwj sequence — An emoji zwj sequence in which every default text presentation character (ED-7) is either followed by an emoji modifier or followed by an emoji presentation selector, and there are no other emoji or text presentation selectors in the sequence.

ED-19. non-fully-qualified emoji zwj sequence — An emoji zwj sequence that is not a fully-qualified emoji zwj sequence.

For recommendations on the use of variation selectors in emoji sequences, see Section 2.4 Emoji Implementation Notes.

1.4.6 Emoji Sets

The following sets are defined based on the data files and properties described in Annex A: Emoji Properties and Data Files. The composition of these sets may change from one release to the next.

ED-20. basic emoji set — The set of emoji code points and emoji presentation sequences intended for general-purpose input.

• The emoji code points are those with property values Emoji=Yes, Emoji_Component=No, and Emoji_Presentation=Yes.
• The emoji presentation sequences are those whose base characters have the property values Emoji=Yes, Emoji_Component=No, and Emoji_Presentation=No.

ED-21. emoji keycap sequence set — The specific set of emoji sequences listed in the emoji-sequences.txt file [emoji-data] under the category Emoji_Keycap_Sequence.

• This is the set of all valid emoji keycap sequences.

ED-22. emoji modifier sequence set — The specific set of emoji sequences listed in the emoji-sequences.txt file [emoji-data] under the category Emoji_Modifier_Sequence.

• This is the set of all valid emoji modifier sequences.

Note: The following definitions use the acronym “RGI” to mean “recommended for general interchange”, referring to that subset of some larger set that is most likely to be widely supported across multiple platforms.

ED-23. RGI emoji flag sequence set — The specific set of emoji sequences listed in the emoji-sequences.txt file [emoji-data] under the category Emoji_Flag_Sequence.

• This is the subset of all valid emoji flag sequences recommended for general interchange. See Annex B: Valid Emoji Flag Sequences

ED-24. RGI emoji tag sequence set — The specific set of emoji sequences listed in the emoji-sequences.txt file [emoji-data] under the category Emoji_Tag_Sequence.

• This is the subset of all valid emoji tag sequences recommended for general interchange. See Annex C. Valid Emoji Tag Sequences.

ED-25. RGI emoji ZWJ sequence set — The specific set of emoji sequences listed in the emoji-zwj-sequences.txt file [emoji-data].

• This is the subset of all valid emoji zwj sequences recommended for general interchange.

ED-26. RGI sequence set — The set of all sequences covered by ED-23, ED-24, and ED-25.

• This is the subset of all valid emoji sequences recommended for general interchange.

1.4.7 Notation

Character names in all capitals are the formal Unicode Name property values, such as U+1F473 MAN WITH TURBAN. The formal names are immutable internal identifiers, but often do not reflect the current practice for interpretation of the character.

Lowercase character names for existing existing characters or sequences are CLDR short names, such as U+1F473 person wearing turban. Lowercase names may also be illustrative names, such as for the sequence <U+1F399 U+20E0> no microphones.

1.4.8 Property Stability

The emoji properties are stable for each version of the data—they will not change for that version. They may, however, change between that version and a subsequent version. For example, isEmoji(♟)=false for Emoji Version 5.0, but true for Version 11.0.

Some emoji properties are not closed over certain string operations. For example:

isEmoji(toLowercase(X)) ≠ isEmoji(X) for the case of X=Ⓜ️, because:

isEmoji(Ⓜ️) = true
toLowercase(Ⓜ️) = ⓜ
isEmoji(ⓜ) = false

Casing operations may produce invalid variation sequences. While the following strings form a case pair, the emoji presentation selector is not defined for ⓜ, and thus has no effect on its rendering:

1.4.9 EBNF and Regex

The following EBNF can be used to scan for possible emoji, which can then be verified by performing validity tests according to the definitions. It is much simpler than the expressions currently in the definitions. It includes a superset of emoji as a by-product of that simplicity, but the extras can be weeded out by validity tests.

possible_emoji :=
  flag_sequence 
| zwj_element (
  (\x{200D} zwj_element)+
  | tag_modifier)

flag_sequence :=
  \p{RI} \p{RI}

zwj_element := 
  \p{Emoji} emoji_modification?

emoji_modification :=
  \p{EMod}
| \x{FE0F} \x{20E3}?

tag_modifier :=
  [\x{E0020}-\x{E007E}]+ \x{E007F}

From these EBNF rules a regex can be generated, as below. While this regex may seem complex, it is far simpler than what would result from the definitions. Direct use of the definitions would result in regex expressions which are many times more complicated, and yet still require verification with validity tests.

  \p{RI} \p{RI}
| \p{Emoji} 
  ( \p{EMod} 
    | \x{FE0F} \x{20E3}? 
    | [\x{E0020}-\x{E007E}]+ \x{E007F} )?
  (\x{200D} \p{Emoji} 
    ( \p{EMod}
      | \x{FE0F} \x{20E3}? )?)+

1.5 Conformance

Conformance to this specification is specified by the following clauses.

C1. An implementation claiming conformance to this specification shall identify the version of this specification to which conformance is claimed.

• Each version of this specification has a minimum version of the Unicode Standard, which contains all the characters with Emoji=Yes. For example, an implementation that claims conformance to Emoji 5.0 must also have support for the Unicode 9.0 repertoire.

C2. An implementation claiming conformance to this specification shall identify which of the capabilities specified below are supported for which emoji sets ED-20 through ED-25. This must include at least the C2a display capability for set ED-20 basic emoji set. For example, an implementation can declare that it supports the display, editing and input capabilities for the basic emoji set, and the display and editing capabilities for the emoji modifier sequence set, and may make no claim of capabilities for any other sets.

Emoji Capabilities

An implementation may claim partial conformance to C2, specifying the set of characters that it does not support. For example, an implementation could claim conformance to C2 for all emoji sets and capabilities except for the set [⏏ {🇺🇳}], that is:

• U+23CF eject button
• U+1F1FA U+1F1F3 United Nations

C3. An implementation claiming conformance to this specification must not support an invalid emoji_flag_sequence or invalid or ill-formed emoji_tag_sequence for display or input, except for a fallback display depiction indicating the presence of an invalid sequence, such as .

• A singleton emoji Regional Indicator may be displayed as a capital A..Z character with a special display

An implementation may support any of the following for display, editing, or input:

• a single code point outside of the basic emoji set
• an emoji sequence that would be in one of the emoji sets ED-20 through ED-25 except that it is missing one or more emoji presentation selectors
• an emoji zwj sequence that is not in ED-25

1.5.1 Collation Conformance

Implementations can claim conformance for emoji collation or short names by conforming to a particular version of CLDR.

1.5.2 Versioning

Starting with Version 11.0 of this specification, the repertoire of emoji characters is synchronized with the Unicode Standard, and has the same version numbering system. Implementers should note that intermediate versions of Emoji might be released between major versions of the Unicode Standard, such as an Emoji Version 11.1. For example, such an intermediate version might add RGI sequences.

The following table shows the corresponding Emoji and Unicode Standard versions, up to Version 11.0:

2 Design Guidelines

Unicode characters can have many different presentations as text. An "a" for example, can look quite different depending on the font. Emoji characters can have two main kinds of presentation:

• an emoji presentation, with colorful and perhaps whimsical shapes, even animated
• a text presentation, such as black & white

More precisely, a text presentation is a simple foreground shape whose color which is determined by other information, such as setting a color on the text, while an emoji presentation determines the color(s) of the character, and is typically multicolored. In other words, when someone changes the text color in a word processor, a character with an emoji presentation will not change color.

Any Unicode character can be presented with a text presentation, as in the Unicode charts. For the emoji presentation, both the name and the representative glyph in the Unicode chart should be taken into account when designing the appearance of the emoji, along with the images used by other vendors. The shape of the character can vary significantly. For example, here are just a few of the possible images for U+1F36D LOLLIPOP, U+1F36E CUSTARD, U+1F36F HONEY POT, and U+1F370 SHORTCAKE:

While the shape of the character can vary significantly, designers should maintain the same “core” shape, based on the shapes used mostly commonly in industry practice. For example, a U+1F36F HONEY POT encodes for a pictorial representation of a pot of honey, not for some semantic like "sweet". It would be unexpected to represent U+1F36F HONEY POT as a sugar cube, for example. Deviating too far from that core shape can cause interoperability problems: see accidentally-sending-friends-a-hairy-heart-emoji. Direction (whether a person or object faces to the right or left, up or down) should also be maintained where possible, because a change in direction can change the meaning: when sending “crocodile shot by police”, people expect any recipient to see the pistol pointing in the same direction as when they composed it. Similarly, the U+1F6B6 pedestrian should face to the left , not to the right. See Section 2.5 Emoji Glyph Facing Direction.

General-purpose emoji for people and body parts should also not be given overly specific images: the general recommendation is to be as neutral as possible regarding race, ethnicity, and gender. Thus for the character U+1F777 CONSTRUCTION WORKER, the recommendation is to use a neutral graphic like (with an orange skin tone) instead of an overly specific image like (with a light skin tone). This includes the emoji modifier base characters listed in Sample Emoji Modifier Bases. The emoji modifiers allow for variations in skin tone to be expressed.

Unicode 9.0 adds several characters intended to complete gender pairs, and there are ongoing efforts to provide more gender choices in the future. For more information, see Section 2.1 Gender.

Names of symbols such as BLACK MEDIUM SQUARE or WHITE MEDIUM SQUARE are not meant to indicate that the corresponding character must be presented in black or white, respectively; rather, the use of “black” and “white” in the names is generally just to contrast filled versus outline shapes, or a darker color fill versus a lighter color fill. Similarly, in other symbols such as the hands U+261A BLACK LEFT POINTING INDEX and U+261C WHITE LEFT POINTING INDEX, the words “white” and “black” also refer to outlined versus filled, and do not indicate skin color.

However, other color words in the name, such as YELLOW, typically provide a recommendation as to the emoji presentation, which should be followed to avoid interoperability problems.

Emoji characters may not always be displayed on a white background. They are often best given a faint, narrow contrasting border to keep the character visually distinct from a similarly colored background. Thus a Japanese flag would have a border so that it would be visible on a white background, and a Swiss flag have a border so that it is visible on a red background.

Current practice is for emoji to have a square aspect ratio, deriving from their origin in Japanese. For interoperability, it is recommended that this practice be continued with current and future emoji. They will typically have about the same vertical placement and advance width as CJK ideographs. For example:

They should use transparency for proper display for selection and with colored backgrounds:

Flag emoji characters are discussed in Annex B: Valid Emoji Flag Sequences .

Combining enclosing marks may be applied to emoji, just like they can be applied to other characters. When that is done, the combination should take on an emoji presentation. For example, a is represented as the sequence "1" plus an emoji presentation selector plus U+20E3 COMBINING ENCLOSING KEYCAP. Systems are unlikely, however, to support arbitrary combining marks with arbitrary emoji. Aside from U+20E3, the most likely to be supported is:

• U+20E0 COMBINING ENCLOSING CIRCLE BACKSLASH, as an overlaid , to indicate a prohibition or “NO”

For example:

• <U+1F399 U+20E0> no microphones
• <U+1F4F8 U+20E0> no flashes
• <U+1F52B U+20E0> no guns

However, U+20E0 and U+20E3 are the only combining marks recommended for such usage.

The set of supported emoji sequences may vary by platform. For example, take the following emoji zwj sequence:

On a particular platform, it can be shown as a single image:

However, if that combination is not supported as a single unit, it may show up as a sequence like the following, and the user sees no indication that it was meant to be composed into a single image:

Implementations could provide an indication of the composed nature of an unsupported emoji sequence where possible. This gives users the additional information that that sequence was intended to have a composed form. It also explains why the sequence will not behave as separate elements: The arrow key will not move between the flag and the skull & crossbones, and line breaks will not occur between apparently separate emoji.

The following is an example of an approach that implementations can use. There are other approaches that could have a more intuitive appearance, but that could be difficult to implement with current text display mechanisms.

Display the ZWJ as a visible “glue” character, zero or very narrow width.

2.1 Gender

The following human-form emoji are currently considered to have explicit gender appearance based on the name and/or practice. They intentionally contrast with other characters. This list may change in the future if new explicit-gender characters are added, or if some of these are changed to be gender-neutral. The names below are the CLDR short names.

U+1F466 boy
U+1F467 girl
U+1F468 man
U+1F469 woman
U+1F474 old man
U+1F475 old woman

U+1F46B man and woman holding hands
U+1F46C two men holding hands
U+1F46D two women holding hands

U+1F385 Santa Claus
U+1F936 Mrs. Claus
U+1F478 princess
U+1F934 prince
U+1F483 woman dancing
U+1F57A man dancing

U+1F470 bride with veil
U+1F935 man in tuxedo

U+1F930 pregnant woman
U+1F931 breast-feeding
U+1F9D5 woman with headscarf

U+1F574 man in suit levitating
U+1F472 man with Chinese cap

2.1.1 Gender-Neutral Emoji

It is often the case that gender is unknown or irrelevant, as in the usage “Is there a doctor on the plane?,” or a gendered appearance may not be desired. Other than the above list, human-form emoji should normally be depicted in a gender-neutral way unless gender appearance is explicitly specified using an emoji ZWJ sequence in one of the ways shown in the following table.

Gender Appearance Mechanisms

Although the human-form emoji used in sign format type ZWJ sequences are supposed to have gender-neutral appearance by themselves (when not used in a sign format type ZWJ sequence), for historical reasons many vendors depict these human-form emoji as a man or woman, so they have the same appearance as one of the sign format type ZWJ sequences. Currently, most vendors depict detective as man detective and person getting haircut as woman getting haircut, but some vendors depict police officer as man police officer while others depict it as woman police officer.

Gender-neutral versions of the profession or role emoji using object format type ZWJ sequences would be promulgated by adding them to the RGI emoji tag sequence set. None have yet been added, pending assessment of the implementation experience with the characters ADULT, CHILD and OLDER ADULT.

2.2 Diversity

People all over the world want to have emoji that reflect more human diversity, especially for skin tone. The Unicode emoji characters for people and body parts are intended to be generic and shown with a generic (nonhuman) appearance, such as a yellow/orange color similar to that used for smiley faces.

Five symbol modifier characters that provide for a range of skin tones for human emoji were released in Unicode Version 8.0 (mid-2015). These characters are based on the six tones of the Fitzpatrick scale, a recognized standard for dermatology (there are many examples of this scale online, such as FitzpatrickSkinType.pdf). The exact shades may vary between implementations.

Emoji Modifiers

Code	CLDR Short Name	Unicode Character Name	Samples
U+1F3FB	light skin tone	EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-1-2
U+1F3FC	medium-light skin tone	EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-3
U+1F3FD	medium skin tone	EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-4
U+1F3FE	medium-dark skin tone	EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-5
U+1F3FF	dark skin tone	EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-6

These characters have been designed so that even where diverse color images for human emoji are not available, readers can see the intended meaning.

When used alone, the default representation of these modifier characters is a color swatch. Whenever one of these characters immediately follows certain characters (such as WOMAN), then a font should show the sequence as a single glyph corresponding to the image for the person(s) or body part with the specified skin tone, such as the following:

+  → 

However, even if the font doesn’t show the combined character, the user can still see that a skin tone was intended:

This may fall back to a black and white stippled or hatched image such as when colorful emoji are not supported.

+  → 

When a human emoji is not immediately followed by a emoji modifier character, it should use a generic, non-realistic skin tone, such as RGB #FFCC22 (one of the colors typically used for the smiley faces).

No particular hair color is required, however, dark hair is generally regarded as more neutral because black or dark brown hair is widespread among people of every skin tone. This does not apply to emoji that already have an explicit hair color such as PERSON WITH BLOND HAIR (originally added for compatibility with Japanese mobile phone emoji), which needs to have blond hair regardless of skin tone.

To have an effect on an emoji, an emoji modifier must immediately follow that base emoji character. Emoji presentation selectors are neither needed nor recommended for emoji characters when they are followed by emoji modifiers, and should not be used in newly generated emoji modifier sequences; the emoji modifier automatically implies the emoji presentation style. See ED-13. emoji modifier sequence. However, some older data may include defective emoji modifier sequences in which an emoji presentation selector does occur between the base emoji character and the emoji modifier; this is the only exception to the rule that an emoji modifier must immediately follow the character that it modifies. In this case the emoji presentation selector should be ignored. For handling text presentation selectors in sequences, see Section 4 Presentation Style.

<U+270C VICTORY HAND, FE0F, TYPE-3>

Any other intervening character causes the emoji modifier to appear as a free-standing character. Thus

+  +  → 

2.2.1 Multi-Person Groupings

Emoji for multi-person groupings present some special challenges:

• Gender combinations. Some multi-person groupings explicitly indicate gender: MAN AND WOMAN HOLDING HANDS, TWO MEN HOLDING HANDS, TWO WOMEN HOLDING HANDS. Others do not: KISS, COUPLE WITH HEART, FAMILY (the latter is also non-specific as to the number of adult and child members). While the default representation for the characters in the latter group should be gender-neutral, implementations may desire to provide (and users may desire to have available) multiple representations of each of these with a variety of more-specific gender combinations.
• Skin tones. In real multi-person groupings, the members may have a variety of skin tones. However, this cannot be indicated using an emoji modifier with any single character for a multi-person grouping. As a result, there are some special considerations. Most single characters for emoji that depict two or more people do not have the Emoji_Modifier_Base property, and should only be shown with a neutral skin tone, for example: family, people wrestling, or handshake. Some emoji including two people have the Emoji_Modifier_Base property, if depiction of skin tone can be avoided in the emoji design, for example:
  • For U+1F486 person getting massage, the hands of the person providing the massage should be depicted with no skin tone showing, perhaps in gloves.
  • For U+1F931 breast feeding, the infant should be depicted with no skin tone showing, perhaps covered in a blanket, so that the emoji is treated as a single person for purposes of skin tone modification.

The basic solution for each of these cases is to represent the multi-person grouping as a sequence of characters—a separate character for each person intended to be part of the grouping, along with characters for any other symbols that are part of the grouping. Each person in the grouping could optionally be followed by an emoji modifier. For example, conveying the notion of COUPLE WITH HEART for a couple involving two women can use a sequence with WOMAN followed by an emoji-style HEAVY BLACK HEART followed by another WOMAN character; each of the WOMAN characters could have an emoji modifier if desired.

This makes use of conventions already found in current emoji usage, in which certain sequences of characters are intended to be displayed as a single unit.

2.2.2 Implementations

Implementations can present the emoji modifiers as separate characters in an input palette, or present the combined characters using mechanisms such as long press.

The emoji modifiers are not intended for combination with arbitrary emoji characters. Instead, they are restricted to the emoji modifier base characters: no other characters are to be combined with emoji modifiers. This set may change over time, with successive versions of this document. To find the exact list of emoji modifier bases for each version, use the Emoji_Modifier_Base character property, as described in Annex A: Emoji Properties and Data Files.

Sample Emoji Modifier Bases

The following chart shows the expected display with emoji modifiers, depending on the preceding character and the level of support for the emoji modifier. The “Unsupported” rows show how the character would typically appear on a system that does not have a font with that character in it: with a missing glyph indicator. In some circumstances, display of an emoji modifier following an Emoji_Modifier_Base character should be suppressed:

If an emoji modifier base has no skin visible on a particular system, then any following emoji modifier should be suppressed.

In other circumstances, display of an emoji modifier following an Emoji_Modifier_Base character may be suppressed:

If a particular emoji modifier base uses a non-realistic skin tone that differs from the default skin tone used for other Emoji_Modifier_Base characters, then any following emoji modifier may be suppressed. For example, suppose vampire is shown with gray skin in a particular implementation while other Emoji_Modifier_Base characters are shown with neon yellow skin in the absence of emoji modifiers; any emoji modifier following vampire may be suppressed.

Expected Emoji Modifiers Display

Support Level	Emoji Modifier Base	Sequence	Display
Fully supported	Yes	+
	Yes	+
	Yes, but no skin visible	+
	Yes, but unusual default skin tone	+
	No	+
Fallback	Yes	+
	No	+
Unsupported	Yes	+
	No	+

As noted above at the end of Section 2.2 Diversity, emoji presentation selectors are neither needed nor recommended for use in emoji modifier sequences. See ED-13. emoji modifier sequence. However, older data may include defective emoji modifier sequences which do include emoji presentation selectors.

2.2.3 Emoji Modifiers in Text

A supported emoji modifier sequence should be treated as a single grapheme cluster for editing purposes (cursor moment, deletion, and so on); word break, line break, and so on. For input, the composition of that cluster does not need to be apparent to the user: it appears on the screen as a single image. On a phone, for example, a long-press on a human figure can bring up a minipalette of different skin tones, without the user having to separately find the human figure and then the modifier. The following shows some possible appearances:

Minipalettes

	or

Of course, there are many other types of diversity in human appearance besides different skin tones: Different hair styles and color, use of eyeglasses, various kinds of facial hair, different body shapes, different headwear, and so on. It is beyond the scope of Unicode to provide an encoding-based mechanism for representing every aspect of human appearance diversity that emoji users might want to indicate. The best approach for communicating very specific human images—or any type of image in which preservation of specific appearance is very important—is the use of embedded graphics, as described in Longer Term Solutions.

2.3 Emoji ZWJ Sequences

The U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER (ZWJ) can be used between the elements of a sequence of characters to indicate that a single glyph should be presented if available. An implementation may use this mechanism to handle such an emoji zwj sequence as a single glyph, with a palette or keyboard that generates the appropriate sequences for the glyphs shown. To the user of such a system, these behave like single emoji characters, even though internally they are sequences.

When an emoji zwj sequence is sent to a system that does not have a corresponding single glyph, the ZWJ characters are ignored and a fallback sequence of separate emoji is displayed. Thus an emoji zwj sequence should only be defined and supported by implementations where the fallback sequence would also make sense to a recipient.

For example, the following are possible displays:

ZWJ Sequence Display

Sequence	Display	Combined glyph?
		Yes
		No

See also the Emoji ZWJ Sequences [emoji-charts].

The use of ZWJ sequences may be difficult in some implementations, so caution should taken before adding new sequences.

For recommendations on the use of variation selectors in ZWJ sequences, see Section 2.4 Emoji Implementation Notes below.

2.4 Emoji Implementation Notes

This section describes important implementation features of emoji, including the use of emoji and text presentation selectors, how to do segmentation, and handling of tag characters.

2.4.1 Emoji and Text Presentation Selectors

2.4.2 Handling Tag Characters

The properties for tag characters U+E0020..U+E007F (TAG SPACE..CANCEL TAG) have been modified for use in indicating variants or extensions of emoji characters. For detailed information on handling TAG sequences correctly, see Annex C: Valid Emoji Tag Sequences.

2.5 Emoji Glyph Facing Direction

Emoji with glyphs that face to the right or left may face either direction, according to vendor practice. However, that inconsistency can cause a change in meaning when exchanging text across platforms. The following ZWJ mechanism can be used to explicitly indicate direction.

Internal Representation	Intended Display	Fallback Appearance

2.6 Hair Components

Emoji Version 11.0 introduces hair components, which can be used in ZWJ sequences to indicate hair colors or styles. The sequences recommended for general interchange (RGI) are listed in the data files. The components include:

• Red-haired (ginger)
• Curly-haired
• White-haired
• Bald

There are hundreds of possible distinctions among hair colors and styles, but to limit the number of combinations—and because emoji are presented with a “cartoon” style—there is a small number of hair components. Note that the hair color blond has already been provided for by an explicit blond man/woman/person emoji . Brown/black-haired are already typical defaults for hair color in human-form emoji.

2.7 Order of Emoji ZWJ Sequences

When representing emoji ZWJ sequences for an individual person, the following order should be used:

• Base
• Emoji modifier or emoji presentation selector
• Hair component
• Gender sign or object—see Section 2.1.1 Gender-Neutral Emoji
• Direction indicator—see Section 2.5 Emoji Glyph Facing Direction

3 Which Characters are Emoji

There are different ways to count the emoji in Unicode, especially since sequences of emoji may appear as single emoji image. The following provides an overview of the ways to count emoji. There is no single number; it can be (for example):

• The count of code points that can be used in emoji, though this includes some code points that are only used as part of sequences and don’t have emoji appearance by themselves;
• All sequences of one or more characters that can appear as a single glyph (which is probably closer to what users think of as the number of emoji), though typically only a subset of possible sequences are displayed as a single glyph on any platform, and some sequences may be platform-specific extensions.

It is recommended that any font or keyboard whose goal is to support Unicode emoji should support the characters and sequences listed in the [emoji-data] data files. The best definition of the full set is in the emoji-test.txt file.

The following table provides more detail about the various counts as of the current version of this specification.

• There is a “Subtotal” row in the table below. Emoji components, such as single Regional Indicators and keycap bases, are not typically used as emoji by themselves, so they are listed as “components”. There are only 26 Regional Indicator (RI) code points, which are used in pairs. Some of these 676 pairs may be displayed as emoji flags, and others may not. The valid pairs are defined in Annex B: Valid Emoji Flag Sequences.
• There are also a number of ZWJ sequences that typically have the same image as some singleton or modifier sequence, because vendors aren‘t yet supporting “gender-neutral” forms. These are listed under “typical dup” below. The Subtotal line does not include these components or typical dup values, and so is a better reflection of what people would see on emoji keyboards/palettes. The keyboards may also use mechanisms like “long press” to handle emoji modifier sequences, further reducing the number of visible cells by subtracting the rows with modifier.

The table is a copy of the Emoji Counts, v11.0 chart. That chart has a much more extensive key to the row headers. It may also be updated over time, if other categorizations are more useful.

Emoji Counts

Separate [emoji-charts] provide more information on many of these subsets and others, for example:

• Emoji characters that were released most recently are listed in Emoji Recently Added.
• Emoji candidates for a future version of Unicode are found in Emoji Candidates.

4 Presentation Style

Certain emoji have defined variation sequences, in which an emoji character can be followed by an invisible emoji presentation selector or text presentation selector.

This capability was added in Unicode 6.1. Some systems may also provide this distinction with higher-level markup, rather than variation sequences. For more information on these selectors, see Emoji Presentation Sequences [emoji-charts]. For details regarding the use of emoji or text presentation selectors in emoji sequences specifically, see Section 2.4 Emoji Implementation Notes.

Implementations should support both styles of presentation for the characters with emoji and text presentation sequences, if possible. Most of these characters are emoji that were unified with preexisting characters. Because people are now using emoji presentation for a broader set of characters, Unicode 9.0 added emoji and text presentation sequences for all emoji with default text presentation (see discussion below). These are the characters shown in the column labeled “Default Text Style; no VS in U8.0” in the Text vs Emoji chart [emoji-charts].

However, even for cases in which the emoji and text presentation selectors are available, it had not been clear for implementers whether the default presentation for pictographs should be emoji or text. That means that a piece of text may show up in a different style than intended when shared across platforms. While this is all a perfectly legitimate for Unicode characters—presentation style is never guaranteed—a shared sense among developers of when to use emoji presentation by default is important, so that there are fewer unexpected or jarring presentations. Implementations need to know what the generally expected default presentation is, to promote interoperability across platforms and applications.

There had been no clear line for implementers between three categories of Unicode characters:

1. emoji-default: those expected to have an emoji presentation by default, but can also have a text presentation
2. text-default: those expected to have a text presentation by default, but could also have an emoji presentation
3. text-only: those that should only have a text presentation

These categories can be distinguished using properties listed in Annex A: Emoji Properties and Data Files. The first category are characters with Emoji=Yes and Emoji_Presentation=Yes. The second category are characters with Emoji=Yes and Emoji_Presentation=No. The third category are characters with Emoji=No.

The presentation of a given emoji character depends on the environment, whether or not there is an emoji or text presentation selector, and the default presentation style (emoji vs text). In informal environments like texting and chats, it is more appropriate for most emoji characters to appear with a colorful emoji presentation, and only get a text presentation with a text presentation selector. Conversely, in formal environments such as word processing, it is generally better for emoji characters to appear with a text presentation, and only get the colorful emoji presentation with the emoji presentation selector.

Based on those factors, here is typical presentation behavior. However, these guidelines may change with changing user expectations.

Emoji vs Text Display

Example Environment	with Emoji presentation selector	with Text presentation selector	with neither
			text-default	emoji-default
word processing
plain web pages
texting, chats

4.1 Emoji and Text Presentation Selectors

As of Unicode 9.0, every emoji character with a default text presentation allows for an emoji or text presentation selector. Thus the presentation of these characters can be controlled on a character-by-character basis. The characters that can have these selectors applied to them are listed in Emoji Variation Sequences [emoji-charts].

In addition, the next two sections describe two other mechanisms for globally controlling the emoji presentation: Using language tags with locale extensions, or using special script codes. Though these are new mechanisms and not yet widely supported, vendors are encouraged to support the locale extension for most general usage such as in browsers; the special script codes may be appropriate for more specific usage such as OpenType font selection, or in APIs. For more information, see [CLDR].

4.2 Emoji Locale Extension

The locale extension “-em” can be used to specify desired presentation for characters that may have both text-style and emoji-style presentations available. There are three values that can be used, here illustrated with “sr-Latn”:

This can be used in HTML, for example, with <html lang="sr-Latn-u-em-emoji">. Note that this approach does not have the disadvantages listed below for the script-tag approach.

4.3 Emoji Script

Two script subtags can be used to control the presentation style. These use script codes defined by ISO 15924 but given more specific semantics by CLDR, see unicode_script_subtag:

• Zsye—prefer emoji style for characters that have both text and emoji styles available.
• Zsym—prefer text style for characters that have both text and emoji styles available.

These script codes are not suitable for use in general language tags:

• They cannot be used with language-script combinations; for example, if the language is sr-Latn (Serbian in Latin script), then Zsye cannot be used.
• They may confuse processes that depend on language tags, such as spell checkers.

However, they may be useful by themselves in specific contexts such as OpenType font selection, or in APIs that take script codes.

4.4 Other Approaches for Control of Emoji Presentation

Other approaches for control of emoji presentation are also in use. For example, in some CSS implementations, if any font in the lookup list is an emoji font, then emoji presentation is used whenever possible.

5 Ordering and Grouping

Neither the Unicode code point order, nor the standard Unicode Collation ordering (DUCET), are currently well suited for emoji, since they separate conceptually-related characters. From the user's perspective, the ordering in the following selection of characters sorted by DUCET appears quite random, as illustrated by the following example:

The emoji-ordering chart file shows an ordering for emoji characters that groups them together in a more natural fashion. This data has been incorporated into [CLDR].

This ordering presents a cleaner and more expected ordering for sorted lists of characters. The groupings include: faces, people, body-parts, emotion, clothing, animals, plants, food, places, transport, and so on. The ordering also groups more naturally for the purpose of selection in input palettes. However, for sorting, each character must occur in only one position, which is not a restriction for input palettes. See Section 6 Input.

6 Input

Emoji are not typically typed on a keyboard. Instead, they are generally picked from a palette, or recognized via a dictionary. The mobile keyboards typically have a button to select a palette of emoji, such as in the left image below. Clicking on the button reveals a palette, as in the right image.

Palette Input

The palettes need to be organized in a meaningful way for users. They typically provide a small number of broad categories, such as People, Nature, and so on. These categories typically have 100-200 emoji.

Many characters can be categorized in multiple ways: an orange is both a plant and a food. Unlike a sort order, an input palette can have multiple instances of a single character. It can thus extend the sort ordering to add characters in any groupings where people might reasonably be expected to look for them.

More advanced palettes will have long-press enabled, so that people can press-and-hold on an emoji and have a set of related emoji pop up. This allows for faster navigation, with less scrolling through the palette.

Annotations for emoji characters are much more finely grained keywords. They can be used for searching characters, and are often easier than palettes for entering emoji characters. For example, when someone types “hourglass” on their mobile phone, they could see and pick from either of the matching emoji characters or . That is often much easier than scrolling through the palette and visually inspecting the screen. Input mechanisms may also map emoticons to emoji as keyboard shortcuts: typing :-) can result in .

In some input systems, a word or phrase bracketed by colons is used to explicitly pick emoji characters. Thus typing in “I saw an :ambulance:” is converted to “I saw an ”. For completeness, such systems might support all of the full Unicode names, such as :first quarter moon with face: for . Spaces within the phrase may be represented by _, as in the following:

“my :alarm_clock: didn’t work”

 → 

“my didn’t work”.

However, in general the full Unicode names are not especially suitable for that sort of use; they were designed to be unique identifiers, and tend to be overly long or confusing.

7 Searching

Searching includes both searching for emoji characters in queries, and finding emoji characters in the target. These are most useful when they include the annotations as synonyms or hints. For example, when someone searches for on yelp.com, they see matches for “gas station”. Conversely, searching for “gas pump” in a search engine could find pages containing . Similarly, searching for “gas pump” in an email program can bring up all the emails containing .

There is no requirement for uniqueness in both palette categories and annotations: an emoji should show up wherever users would expect it. A gas pump might show up under “object” and “travel”; a heart under “heart” and “emotion”, a under “animal”, “cat”, and “heart”.

Annotations are language-specific: searching on yelp.de, someone would expect a search for to result in matches for “Tankstelle”. Thus annotations need to be in multiple languages to be useful across languages. They should also include regional annotations within a given language, like “petrol station”, which people would expect search for to result in on yelp.co.uk. An English annotation cannot simply be translated into different languages, since different words may have different associations in different languages. The emoji may be associated with Mexican or Southwestern restaurants in the US, but not be associated with them in, say, Greece.

There is one further kind of annotation, called a TTS name, for text-to-speech processing. For accessibility when reading text, it is useful to have a short, descriptive name for an emoji character. A Unicode character name can often serve as a basis for this, but its requirements for name uniqueness often ends up with names that are overly long, such as BLACK RIGHT-POINTING TRIANGLE WITH DOUBLE VERTICAL BAR for . TTS names are also outside the current scope of this document.

8 Longer Term Solutions

The longer-term goal for implementations should be to support embedded graphics, in addition to the emoji characters. Embedded graphics allow arbitrary emoji symbols, and are not dependent on additional Unicode encoding. Some examples of this are found in Skype and LINE—see the emoji press page for more examples.

However, to be as effective and simple to use as emoji characters, a full solution requires significant infrastructure changes to allow simple, reliable input and transport of images (stickers) in texting, chat, mobile phones, email programs, virtual and mobile keyboards, and so on. (Even so, such images will never interchange in environments that only support plain text, such as email addresses.) Until that time, many implementations will need to use Unicode emoji instead.

For example, mobile keyboards need to be enhanced. Enabling embedded graphics would involve adding an additional custom mechanism for users to add in their own graphics or purchase additional sets, such as a sign to add an image to the palette above. This would prompt the user to paste or otherwise select a graphic, and add annotations for dictionary selection.

With such an enhanced mobile keyboard, the user could then select those graphics in the same way as selecting the Unicode emoji. If users started adding many custom graphics, the mobile keyboard might even be enhanced to allow ordering or organization of those graphics so that they can be quickly accessed. The extra graphics would need to be disabled if the target of the mobile keyboard (such as an email header line) would only accept text.

Other features required to make embedded graphics work well include the ability of images to scale with font size, inclusion of embedded images in more transport protocols, switching services and applications to use protocols that do permit inclusion of embedded images (for example, MMS versus SMS for text messages). There will always, however, be places where embedded graphics can’t be used—such as email headers, SMS messages, or file names. There are also privacy aspects to implementations of embedded graphics: if the graphic itself is not packaged with the text, but instead is just a reference to an image on a server, then that server could track usage.

Annex A: Emoji Properties and Data Files

The following binary character properties are available for emoji characters. These are not formally part of the Unicode Character Database (UCD), but share the same namespace and structure.

Emoji Properties

If Emoji=No, then Emoji_Presentation=No, Emoji_Modifier=No, and Emoji_Modifier_Base=No.

A.1 Data Files

The following data files are included in the release (see [emoji-data]):

See [emoji-charts] for a collection of charts that have been generated from the emoji data files and the related [CLDR] emoji data (annotations and ordering). They are purely illustrative; the data to use for implementation is in [emoji-data].

Annex B: Valid Emoji Flag Sequences

While the syntax of a well-formed emoji flag sequence is defined in ED-14, only valid sequences are displayed as flags by conformant implementations, where:

• The valid region sequences are specified by Unicode region subtags as defined in [CLDR], with idStatus=regular, deprecated, or macroregion. For macroregions, only UN and EU are valid.

Deprecated region sequences should not be generated, but may be supported for backward compatibility. Macroregion region sequences generally do not have official flags, with the exception of UN and EU.

Some region sequences represent countries (as recognized by the United Nations, for example); others represent territories that are associated with a country. Such territories may have flags of their own, or may use the flag of the country with which they are associated. Depictions of images for flags may be subject to constraints by the administration of that region.

Caveats:

• Although a pair of REGIONAL INDICATOR symbols is referred to as an emoji_flag_sequence, it really represents a specific region, not a specific flag for that region. The actual flag displayed for the pair may be different on different platforms, for example for territories which do not have an official flag. The displayed flag may change over time as regions change their flags and platforms update their software.
• For some territories (especially those without separate official flags), the displayed flag may be the same as the flag for the country with which they are associated. For more about cases where characters have the same appearance, see UTR #36: Unicode Security Considerations [UTR36].

For additional information see the sub-section on Regional Indicator Symbols in Section 22.10 Enclosed and Square of [Unicode].

B.1 Presentation

Emoji are generally presented with a square aspect ratio, which presents a problem for flags. The flag for Qatar is over 150% wider than tall; for Switzerland it is square; for Nepal it is over 20% taller than wide. To avoid a ransom-note effect, implementations may want to use a fixed ratio across all flags, such as 150%, with a blank band on the top and bottom. (The average width for flags is between 150% and 165%.) Presentation as a waving flag, or clipping to a circle, can help to present a uniform appearance, masking the aspect differences.

Flags should have a visible edge. One option is to use a one-pixel gray line chosen to be contrasting with the adjacent field color.

For an open-source set of flag images (png and svg), see region-flags.

Options for presenting an emoji_flag_sequence for which a system does not have a specific flag or other glyph include:

• Display each REGIONAL INDICATOR symbol separately as a letter in a dotted square, as shown in the Unicode charts. This provides information about the specific region indicated, but may be mystifying to some users.
• For all unsupported REGIONAL INDICATOR pairs, display the same missing flag glyph, such as the image shown below. This would indicate that the supported pair was intended to represent the flag of some region, without indicating which one.

  

B.2 Ordering

The code point order of flags is by region code, which will not be intuitive for users, since that rarely matches the order of countries in the user‘s language. English speakers are surprised that the flag for Germany comes before the flag for Djibouti. An alternative is to present the sorted order according to the localized country name, using [CLDR] data.

Annex C. Valid Emoji Tag Sequences

While the syntax of a well-formed emoji tag sequence is defined in ED-14a, not all possible tag sequences are valid. The only valid sequences in this version of Unicode Emoji are defined by sections in this annex, which specify valid combinations of <tag_base> characters and <tag_spec> sequences and their expected presentation. Conformant implementations only display valid sequences as emoji, and display invalid sequences with a special presentation to show that they are invalid, such as in the examples below.

There is one common constraint on valid emoji tag sequences: the entire emoji_tag_sequence, including tag_base and tag_term, must not be longer than 32 code points. This provides a practical limit needed by many rendering systems, and is consistent with the 32-code-point buffer limit specified for the Stream-Safe Text Format as defined in UAX #15: Unicode Normalization Forms [UAX15].

In examples in this section, underlined ASCII characters represent the corresponding tag characters, while ✦ represents the tag_term.

C.1 Flag Emoji Tag Sequences

A valid flag emoji tag sequence must satisfy the following constraints:

1. The tag_base and tag_spec are limited to the following:

   tag_base	U+1F3F4 BLACK FLAG
   tag_spec	(U+E0030 TAG DIGIT ZERO .. U+E0039 TAG DIGIT NINE, U+E0061 TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER A .. U+E007A TAG LATIN SMALL LETTER Z)+

2. Let SD be the result of mapping each character in the tag_spec to a character in [0-9a-z] by subtracting 0xE0000.
   1. SD must then be a specification as per [CLDR] of either a Unicode subdivision_id (data) or a 3-digit unicode_region_subtag (data), and
   2. SD must have CLDR idStatus equal to "regular" or "deprecated".

Notes:

1. The deprecated SD values are only included for compatibility, and should not be used. They are included so that deprecations in the future do not invalidate previously valid emoji tag sequences.
2. There is no hyphen in the tag_spec, unlike ISO subdivisions like “GB-SCT”.
3. These flag emoji tag sequences are used to request an image for whatever is currently the flag of the specified subregion. Like the emoji flag sequences, they are not intended to provide a mechanism for versioned representations of any particular flag image.
4. Specific platforms and programs decide which emoji extended flag sequences they will support. There is no requirement that any be supported, and no expectation that more than a small number be commonly supported by vendors.
5. Note that SD cannot be a two-letter code like "US" or "us".

C.1.1 Sample Valid Emoji Tag Sequences

A completely tag-unaware implementation will display any any sequence of tag characters as invisible, without any effect on adjacent characters. The following sections apply to conformant implementations that support at least one tag sequence.

An implementation may support emoji tag sequences, but not support a particular valid emoji tag sequence.

Images for unsupported valid emoji tag sequences must indicate that the sequence image is missing, by showing the base glyph with either a following “missing emoji glyph” or with an overlay “missing” glyph. The overlay glyph approach is recommended, so that the sequence would have the same width as if supported. A tag-unaware implementation (TU) will show just the base character.

Sequence	Sample Images				Comments	RGI sequence?
	Supported	Unsupported		TU
gbeng✦					England	Yes
gbsct✦					Scotland	Yes
gbwls✦					Wales	Yes
usca✦					California	No
caon✦					Ontario	No
chzh✦					Canton Zürich	No
frnor✦					Normandy	No

C.1.1 Sample Invalid Emoji Tag Sequences

Images for invalid (but well-formed) emoji tag sequences must not be interpreted as if they were regular emoji tag sequences for a different appearance. They must instead indicate that there is something wrong with the sequence. The recommended approach is to also show the base glyph with either a following “missing emoji glyph” or with an overlay “missing” glyph.

Sequence	Rec. Images		TU	Comments
ushuh✦				Incorrect subregion with “us’ region
uksct✦				No “uk” region so incorrect subregion
usca✦				Base invalid for flag tag emoji sequence
olvikan✦				Invalid base and tag_spec — not conformant to show as a ”demon“ or other non-missing image

C.1.3 Sample Ill-formed Emoji Tag Sequences

Images for an ill-formed tag sequence should indicate that there is something wrong with the sequence. The recommended approach is to show the ill-formed tag sequence as a “missing emoji glyph”.

Sequence	Rec. Images	TU	Comments
Ausca✦	A	A	No emoji base
usca✦			No base
usca			No terminator
usca			No base, no terminator

Acknowledgments

Mark Davis and Peter Edberg created the initial versions of this document, and maintain the text.

Thanks to Shervin Afshar, Julie Allen, Rachel Been, Nicole Bleuel, Jeremy Burge, Michele Coady, Chenjintao (陈锦涛), Chenshiwei, Peter Constable, David Corbett, Craig Cummings, Behnam Esfahbod, Doug Ewell, Agustin Fonts, Asmus Freytag, Claudia Galvan, Andrew Glass, Casey Henson, Paul Hunt, Tayfun Karadeniz, Hiroyuki Komatsu, Jennifer 8. Lee, Norbert Lindenberg, Ken Lunde, Gwyneth Marshall, Rick McGowan, Katsuhiko Momoi, Lisa Moore, Katsuhiro Ogata, Katrina Parrott, Michelle Perham, Addison Phillips, Roozbeh Pournader, Judy Safran-Aasen, Markus Scherer, Alolita Sharma, Jane Solomon, Richard Tunnicliffe, and Ken Whistler for feedback on and contributions to this document and related data and charts, including earlier versions.

Thanks to Adobe / Paul Hunt, Apple, Emojination, EmojiOne, Emojipedia, EmojiXpress, Michael Everson, Facebook, Google, iDiversicons, Microsoft, Samsung, and Twitter for supplying images for illustration in this document.

Rights to Emoji Images

The content for this section, discussing right and acknowledgments, has been moved to Emoji Images and Rights.

References

Modifications

The following summarizes modifications from the previous revisions of this document.

Revision 14

• Reissued as Version 11.0.
• Summary
  • Described the change of versioning after 5.0, and updated the rest of the status section.
• Section 1.4.1 Emoji Characters
  • Clarified wording in ED-3.
  • Restored the previously-removed ED-4 as a new definition of extended pictographic character.
• Section 1.4.5 Emoji Sequences
  • ED-14b. emoji combining sequence
    • Removed text_presentation_sequence, because any sequence containing a text presentation sequence is specifically not presented as emoji, and breaks any enclosing emoji sequence.
    • changed the definition to only include emoji keycap sequences, not arbitrary sequences with enclosing marks.
• Section 1.4.7 Notation
  • Moved here, was formerly Section 1.5.2.
• Section 1.4.8 Property Stability
  • Added new section clarifying stability across versions and closure under string operations such as toLowerCase().
• Section 1.4.9 EBNF and Regex
  • Added EBNF and Regex expressions for doing loose matches on emoji (before applying validity checks).
• Section 1.5.2 Versioning
  • Added section describing versioning (replaces material moved to Section 1.4.7 Notation).
• Section 2 Design Guidelines
  • Added example of visible fallback for ZWJ sequences (the most implementable of several examples considered).
• Section 2.1.1 Gender-Neutral Emoji
  • Expanded the short paragraph formerly at the end of section 2.1 into a new section which also adds material on mechanisms for specifying gender appearance.
• Section 2.2 Diversity
  • Since most platforms now use the yellow/orange smiley color for default skin tone, removed material suggesting other possible colors.
  • Clarified text around default hair color.
• Section 2.2.1 Multi_Person_Groupings
  • Clarified application of modifiers to multi-person emoji.
• Section 2.2.2 Diversity_Implementations
  • Clarified application of modifiers to human-form emoji without visible skin, or with non-human skin tone.
• Section 2.5 Emoji Glyph Facing Direction
  • Added mechanism for changing the direction that characters’ glyphs face.
• Section 2.6 Hair Components
  • Added description of the new hair components
• Section 2.7 Order of Emoji ZWJ Sequences
  • Added description of the preferred internal ordering of characters in ZWJ sequences.
• Section 3 Which Characters are Emoji
  • Updated the table of emoji counts, referring for more detail to the [emoji-charts].
• Annex A: Emoji Properties and Data Files
  • Added short property names under “Abbr”.
  • Documented that Emoji_Component characters are not all Emoji.
  • Added the Extended_Pictographic property

Modifications for prior versions can be found by going to Version 5.0 of this specification.

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