What is Emoji and How to Use Unicode Codes in Web and App Development

What is Emoji?

Emoji are small pictorial symbols used to communicate emotions and meanings in digital conversations. The word emoji comes from Japanese (絵文字), meaning "picture character." They were first developed in Japan in the late 1990s and went global after Apple added an emoji keyboard in iOS 5.

What is the Unicode Standard?

Unicode is an international standard for encoding characters and symbols from all languages. Each emoji has a unique code point, for example 😀 has the code point U+1F600.

Using Emoji in Development

Emoji can be inserted in HTML using entities like 😀 for 😀, in CSS using Unicode escapes like content: "\1F600";, and in JavaScript using "\uD83D\uDE00".

Why Do Emoji Look Different Across Platforms?

Although Unicode defines the same code point, the visual design of each emoji depends on the platform — Apple, Google, and Microsoft each design their own emoji sets, so the appearance differs but the meaning remains the same.

Use our Emoji Picker to find any emoji and copy its Unicode code, HTML entity or JS escape in one click.