
Emojipedia.org - nkjoep
http://emojipedia.org/
======
danso
I'm fascinated by people who think emoji could someday be a more universal way
of communication given all of its inherent ambiguity. My off-the-top-of-my-
head example was the prayer emoji, which has popularly been said to be a
mistranslation of a purported "high five":
[http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865606309/This-emoji-
may-...](http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865606309/This-emoji-may-not-be-
what-you-think-it-is.html)

But as Emojipedia points out, the Unicode definition is "person with folded
hands". As a Westerner, I'm inclined to associate this with "prayer". But
since we have the Japanese to largely thank for emoji in the first place,
shouldn't this emoji be seen as "please" or "thank you"?

[http://emojipedia.org/person-with-folded-
hands/](http://emojipedia.org/person-with-folded-hands/)

And if you look at that Emojipedia entry, you start to appreciate the
cluaterfuck of things lost in translation. Not only is the gesture of folded
hands of varied meanings across cultures, but each software vendor adds their
own interpretation.

Compare Samsung's rendering:

[http://emojipedia-
us.s3.amazonaws.com/cache/f7/f4/f7f45466d6...](http://emojipedia-
us.s3.amazonaws.com/cache/f7/f4/f7f45466d6cb6ccb8aa1c485bffd2ecc.png)

With HTCs: [http://emojipedia-
us.s3.amazonaws.com/cache/97/d6/97d6ea79e4...](http://emojipedia-
us.s3.amazonaws.com/cache/97/d6/97d6ea79e4b42ec8dcedf05b1f6a0431.png)

Admittedly, emojis are more immediately expressive than, say, learning a whole
other written language. But the amount of ambiguity and confusion ultimately
remains the same IMO

~~~
dqv
It can still be a universal language - it will just have different dialects.

~~~
sreenadh
Yes. Emojis are a pictorial representation. Even some scripts of early
civilization used communicate via pictures. Plus emojis-like symbols are even
used by autistic kids. There is an app in ipad with all pictures that they use
to communicate what they want.

~~~
rootlocus
Limiting our vocabulary to that of cavemen or children with limited
capabilities is not a step forward in evolution. At least not one I'm looking
forward to.

~~~
Klathmon
Nobody is arguing for limiting our communication to only emoji, but augmenting
it with emoji.

Sometimes I want to write an essay, other times I just want to text a poop
emoji+sad face to a friend because he's being a shithead.

They can both exist happily in the same world.

------
kensai
I was exactly here yesterday after a discussion with a friend of mine about
the meaning of "Face With Steam From Nose" [1].

I work in an academic institute with many nationalities and almost all people
(of different cultural backgrounds) describe this emoticon as an emoticon
showing anger and frustration. Yet the official description in Unicode 6.0 [2]
is "face with look of triumph" . Was it simply bad design?

[1] [http://emojipedia.org/face-with-look-of-
triumph/](http://emojipedia.org/face-with-look-of-triumph/) [2]
[http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-6.0/U60-1F600.pdf](http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-6.0/U60-1F600.pdf)

I am curious, have you found other similar examples?

~~~
1_player
I don't have an answer, but emojis seem to have been inspired by the Japanese
culture. Perhaps steam from the nose is a common Japanese representation of
victory?

I get that emojis were first invented for use on Japanese phones, but I don't
understand why they kept them Japanese oriented when merged into Unicode?
There's ideographs [1], acronyms that are relevant only to JP [2] and fish on
a pole [3]

Surely we could've made better use of the Unicode space to use a common set of
symbol shared by all cultures.

1: [http://emojipedia.org/squared-cjk-unified-
ideograph-7981/](http://emojipedia.org/squared-cjk-unified-ideograph-7981/)

2: [http://emojipedia.org/squared-ng/](http://emojipedia.org/squared-ng/)

3: [http://emojipedia.org/carp-streamer/](http://emojipedia.org/carp-
streamer/)

~~~
Freak_NL
> Surely we could've made better use of the Unicode space […]

There is plenty of space.

Keep in mind that one of the goals of Unicode is to be able to represent
existing corpora of text by means of a global standard. Emoji were in
widespread use in Japanese mobile phones long before smartphones existed; that
alone legitimises their presence in the Unicode standard.

Like a dictionary, the Unicode standard is in a large part descriptive rather
than prescriptive. It catalogues what is in use, not what ought to be used.
However, recent emoji contributions do seem to have been made in the spirit of
filling lacunae in the set.

------
theandrewbailey
If you have a textbox on the internet, eventually some special snowflake will
put emoji into it. And one day, you'll wake up to your backend systems on
fire, because someone decided that their name was the smiling pile of poop
emoji.[0] (Are your backend systems jealous that someone else is named that?)

I've recently needed to make some fields emoji-proof. This seems like a great
resource for testing. Thanks for sharing.

[0] [http://emojipedia.org/pile-of-poo/](http://emojipedia.org/pile-of-poo/)

~~~
danso
Reminds me of when I wrote an app to track and store tweets about a given
hashtag. Worked fine in its first few months, then started throwing encoding
errors right around the time Twitter enabled emoji support. I was using MySQL
as a data store and was ignorant to the fact that UTF8 encoding in MySQL only
uses 3 bytes. I was ignorant about encoding in general but thought that UTF8
always meant 4-bytes. Apparently so did many other MySQL users, and it was bad
enough that MySQL questions on Stackoverflow are already filled with erroneous
info about all kinds of encoding issues.

The search for the fix -- which is that MySQL has a utf8mb4 encoding for
4-bytes -- was probably the most frustrating debugging exercise in my career.
Even worse was the eventual revelation that the MySQL devs were technically
right -- the UTF8 spec says nothing about requiring 4 bytes, and 3 bytes
probably seemed sensible enough in terms of efficiency at the time of MySQL 4.

~~~
rootlocus
From RFC-3629 [1] (the UTF8 spec), on page 4:

    
    
      In UTF-8, characters from the U+0000..U+10FFFF range (the UTF-16 
      accessible range) are encoded using sequences of 1 to 4 octets.
    

It would be absurd for an encoding that's used by 88.9% of the web [2] to be
implemented in a way that doesn't respect the standard.

[1]
[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3629#page-5](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3629#page-5)

[2] [https://www.wikiwand.com/en/UTF-8](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/UTF-8)

------
rootlocus
I don't understand why emojis should be customizable with skin colors. And
five of them nonetheless. If discriminating based on skin color is racist, why
do we invent new ways to do it? I'd rather use a single color for everyone
(don't care which) because I don't want to express "a black man smiling", I
want to express "a man smiling".

~~~
timpark
> (don't care which)

> I don't want to express "a black man smiling"

Which is it?

~~~
wingerlang
Are you deliberately avoiding the rest of what he wrote? The point is that he
doesn't care to involve color at all, having only one color would remove the
"it's color X smiling" choice.

------
amelius
Emojimakers do not seem to understand that there is a difference between big
smiles.

For example, this [1] big smile represents a totally different emotion than
[2].

Now look at the "grinning face" set of emoticons [3], which represents a total
grab-bag of emotions. You really can't reliably use emoticons these days.

[1] [https://img.myloview.es/fotomurales/gran-sonrisa-con-
dientes...](https://img.myloview.es/fotomurales/gran-sonrisa-con-
dientes-400-6831667.jpg)

[2] [http://www.clipartkid.com/images/101/smiley-face-clip-art-
em...](http://www.clipartkid.com/images/101/smiley-face-clip-art-emotions-
clipart-panda-free-clipart-images-S5COzM-clipart.jpeg)

[3] [http://emojipedia.org/grinning-face/](http://emojipedia.org/grinning-
face/)

------
eriknstr
Emojipedia is a great resource, I use it frequently to find emojis by name.

------
spthorn60
Interesting insight into the emoji approval process (podcast):
[https://food52.com/blog/19350-why-is-there-no-pie-
emoji](https://food52.com/blog/19350-why-is-there-no-pie-emoji)

Also:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958682](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958682)

------
miguelrochefort
Wow. I never thought all those emojis were implemented on so many different
platforms.

Are there official specs? Who designed the original emojis everyone else
copied?

~~~
petepete
They fall under the Unicode standard. Warning, this page is quite big!

[http://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-
list.html](http://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html)

------
drake01
can't believe it made it to hn front page. HackerNews works in mysterious
ways.

------
sreenadh
Are all emojis just unicode?

~~~
Freak_NL
Depends on what you mean by emoji, but all of the emoji you can use on
smartphones and in social media tend to be part of the Unicode standard. They
are like any other Unicode character; i.e., they have their own codepoint
assigned, and can be represented in a valid Unicode encoding such as UTF-8.
Some can be modified with modifying characters (skin colour is a modifiable
attribute these days), but this too is not a new feature (e.g., combining
diacritic characters do this too, although mostly you would just use the
composed variants (like é) instead).

