
Show HN: I couldn't figure out what an Emoji meant, so I made WhatMoji.com - nk-
http://whatmoji.com/
======
gtk40
I feel like [http://emojipedia.org/](http://emojipedia.org/) is a better
website with more information. I've been regularly using it since Emoji have
become a thing. It gives more context about the meaning of symbols, is easier
to search the other way, and also shows how the image appears on various
different platforms.

~~~
jonlucc
Emojipedia doesn't say anything about alternative meanings for the peach or
eggplant emojis. I need something for more cultural meanings, too.

~~~
sjs382
Neither does whatmoji, though.

Taco:
[http://whatmoji.com/?i=21c542c341eb67e1cb7a4ba4a21052ff](http://whatmoji.com/?i=21c542c341eb67e1cb7a4ba4a21052ff)

Eggplant:
[http://whatmoji.com/?i=376bf089b6f3e4f4eb7e9e13c4ce1cb2](http://whatmoji.com/?i=376bf089b6f3e4f4eb7e9e13c4ce1cb2)

peach:
[http://whatmoji.com/?i=1633b26bb2deb796dab3660132424995](http://whatmoji.com/?i=1633b26bb2deb796dab3660132424995)

------
LukeB_UK
It still doesn't really tell you what it means, just the name/annotation.

~~~
nk-
True, but it does give you a hint at least. I would have never guessed that
this was a shrimp for example:
[http://whatmoji.com/?i=b65555fbf55380ec0970a060b2457527](http://whatmoji.com/?i=b65555fbf55380ec0970a060b2457527)

~~~
azinman2
Except so many of them are culturally specific, like the horn emoji on the
front page has roots in postal systems (both in Japan and Europe). This page
doesn't tell you that. Even this random website does a better job of giving
context: [http://emojipedia.org/postal-horn/](http://emojipedia.org/postal-
horn/)

~~~
sotojuan
Well, Emoji are originally Japanese so you always have to keep that in mind.

~~~
azinman2
The point is "what is this emoji?" Knowing emoji started in Japan still
doesn't tell you what the emoji is or means!

------
madvoid
Quick tip if you are on OS X: Pressing ctrl+command+space pops up an emoji
bank so you can enter them in any text field. Now you don't have to hunt for
emojis to put in the website.

Love the website btw!

~~~
evincarofautumn
I tend to copy and paste from Emacs, so I can search for emoji and other
Unicode characters by name with C-x 8 RET.

~~~
tetraodonpuffer
you can also autocomplete emojis in emacs

[https://github.com/syohex/emacs-ac-emoji](https://github.com/syohex/emacs-ac-
emoji) [https://github.com/dunn/company-
emoji](https://github.com/dunn/company-emoji)

and display them as well

[https://github.com/iqbalansari/emacs-
emojify](https://github.com/iqbalansari/emacs-emojify)

------
nk-
And yes, I know I could have just looked it up in many different ways.

But any programmer knows that an elaborate solution that takes a day of
programming is a lot more fun than a 1-minute fix that just solves the problem
at hand!

~~~
linker3000
> But any programmer knows that an elaborate solution that takes a day of
> programming is a lot more fun than a 1-minute fix that just solves the
> problem at hand!

Don't put that on your CV/resumé

~~~
Grazester
I lol'ed!

------
TJTorola
It would be cool if you could allow for user commenting/voting so that people
could add and build up cultural context for them rather than just having the
spec definition. If you got enough of a community around that it could become
very useful. Kinda like Urban Dictionary for Emoji.

------
agentgt
It would be nice if it supported the ASCII text shortcuts like :poop: (see
[http://www.emoji-cheat-sheet.com/](http://www.emoji-cheat-sheet.com/)).

You could also make the URL route based on the ascii shortcut as well (as
previously mentioned by another user).

------
danso
Reading this article sent me on a whirlwind of Wikipediaing and
Googling...just like Unicode itself is vastly complicated, so is the thought
and design behind emojis, which have their own technical subcommittee [0],
currently chaired by Apple and Google employees.

One of the best articles I came across is from Huffington Post, before the
inclusion of multi-colored faces in 2015:

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/27/emoji-
meaning_n_553...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/27/emoji-
meaning_n_5530638.html)

I knew that trying to design universally readable iconography is an
essentially impossible task in itself, but the article brings up a lot of
other interesting issues, such as the worry that Apple might take it upon
themselves to revamp their emojis which were designed before the "flat" days:

> _By comparison, Apple’s iconic emoji are horribly out of fashion. Its icons
> have shadows, depth and a three-dimensional look that’s a holdover from the
> Steve Jobs era of skeuomorphic design. Flat illustration free of texture or
> highlights is now de rigeur. Apple has already abandoned the faux-wood
> paneling and leather elsewhere in its software, and its emoji could change
> at any time — potentially a rude shock for those who’ve come to identify
> with the brand’s symbols. “I kind of hope they don’t [change it],” said Van
> Lancker._

Even the HTML of the article itself contains interesting insights, especially
about web production and the challenges of digital preservation. I thought at
first that, in a decade, the opening paragraph might completely lose its
meaning...but then I opened up my web inspector:

[http://imgur.com/YUVtwPe](http://imgur.com/YUVtwPe)

[0] [http://unicode.org/emoji/](http://unicode.org/emoji/)

------
jstanley
It seems to permanently (?) store all of the input text. Why?

[http://whatmoji.com/?i=da510f5876a15885fa89de8abe731d3c](http://whatmoji.com/?i=da510f5876a15885fa89de8abe731d3c)

EDIT: OK, so it stores only the emojis. The actual text is removed.

~~~
nk-
Yes, it stores the list of emojis so that you can link to it. The text is
never stored.

Are you concerned this might be a privacy issue? I could change it to only
store searches on demand.

~~~
jstanley
That was my concern at first, but I don't think it's an issue if it doesn't
store the entire text.

------
bckmn
I ran into this problem in a side project recently and made a package to
programmatically fix it: [https://github.com/NarroApp/translate-
emoji](https://github.com/NarroApp/translate-emoji)

~~~
ClemDoum
Nice work!

You could even go further using algorithms like Sense2Vec
([https://spacy.io/demos/sense2vec?%3B%29|NOUN](https://spacy.io/demos/sense2vec?%3B%29|NOUN)).
They are able to figure out similarities between emojis and between emojis and
words.

~~~
MasterScrat
Instagram team did it:

[http://instagram-
engineering.tumblr.com/post/117889701472/em...](http://instagram-
engineering.tumblr.com/post/117889701472/emojineering-part-1-machine-learning-
for-emoji)

------
vincentbarr
I believe an emoji dictionary is only helpful if emoji senders universally
rely and agree upon its definitions.

I find myself confused by emojis from time to time, and for me the confusion
doesn't stem from misunderstanding the emoji's expression, it stems from what
the emoji means within the context of the conversation and my relationship
with the sender.

Emojis can lessen ambiguity when they're used to complement a message or
communicate tone. I believe they increase ambiguity, however, when they're
used to replace words altogether.

------
migueltarga
[http://whatmoji.com/?i=148391ab065fc0104c28dbc67913f335](http://whatmoji.com/?i=148391ab065fc0104c28dbc67913f335)

I thought this was a high five...

------
Symbiote
I installed the Debian package "unicode", which will accept an emoji as an
argument and print the Unicode description.

It also searches the descriptions, if given a word as an argument.

------
tennix
I believe emoji is designed to be expressive, if we need to look it up in a
emoji dictionary ,then emoji goes wrong. The fact is that everybody wants to
add their favourite emoji, but more emoji added more confusion it will be
make. Just imagine we lookup an emoji before we send to others, and the
receiver has to look it up in a dictionary to know what the sender want to
express. Why not just using the normal words we already know very well

~~~
Trundle
>Why not just using the normal words we already know very well

A persons answer to that can be "I don't know. I think we should just use the
normal words we already know very well" yet still have to life in the current
reality of many people using emojis. Hence OP's service.

------
hellbanner
Good site. ..funny that programmers & cell phone carriers are re-inventing
Chinese-style (pictorial language)

------
M4v3R
Nice! One little thing is that it really doesn't describe skin tones well:
[http://i.imgur.com/dGg1026.png](http://i.imgur.com/dGg1026.png)

------
matthewowen
I wish this went deeper. Emoji are like the symbols on the alethiometer.

~~~
exolymph
A+ reference. Also I would 100% download an emoji alethiometer app.

------
derefr
Ah, but what does 🈚️ mean? :)

WhatMoji doesn't recognize it; Emojipedia doesn't either; and Google returns
zero results. Some of the original imported Softbank characters are _arcane_.
_These_ are the ones I want to look up—not because the meaning is vaguely
between two possible semantic clusters, but because I literally have no idea
how to even describe the character to search for it.

~~~
MarkSweep
Maybe that's just a Chinese character? It looks like the character for
"nothing" (無) enclosed in a box.

Part of the problem is that the character you pasted is made up of two code
points (I don't know if I have the terminology right here):

[http://apps.timwhitlock.info/unicode/inspect?s=%F0%9F%88%9A%...](http://apps.timwhitlock.info/unicode/inspect?s=%F0%9F%88%9A%EF%B8%8F)

It's both the character plus a "variation selector".:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variation_Selectors_(Unicode_b...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variation_Selectors_\(Unicode_block\))

If you search for the character by itself ( 🈚 ) you get results on google:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=🈚](https://www.google.com/search?q=🈚)

------
heywire
Just an FYI, my workplace McAfee Gateway filters this site due to
"Violence"(??!). Not sure what you have to do to get off that list.

------
mentalbastille
This looks very similar to [http://emojipedia.org/](http://emojipedia.org/)

------
bpatel576
Would be nice if you provided a bank of emojis so I wouldn't have to go to
another source in order to copy and paste them in.

~~~
nk-
The idea behind the site was that you would see an emoji on a website
somewhere and couldn't figure out what it meant. So the main "use case" I have
in mind is indeed someone copy/pasting them from somewhere else.

What would you like to do that would require a bank of emojis on the site
itself?

~~~
23andwalnut
A bank would be useful for general learning. i.e. when I went to the site just
now, I didn't have a specific emoji that I needed to identify, but if there
had been a 'bank of emojis' I probably would have wasted a few minutes of my
day reading about what they mean...because I frequently have no idea what
emojis mean...

And by wasted I mean I wouldn't have been working. Not a jab at your project
:)

~~~
nk-
I see - I just added links to lists of most emojis to the header:
[http://whatmoji.com/](http://whatmoji.com/)

I hope this helps you waste a few minutes! :)

~~~
viewer5
I'm not really up on how text rendering works; what's it mean if I can see
some of those, but not others? e.g. I have Rocket but not Helicopter; not
Steam Locomotive but Railway Car and High-Speed Train; Taxi and Automobile but
not their Oncoming variants; Toilet, Water Closet, and Bath but not Shower.

Is there something I need to install, or something? I'm on Win7 with up-to-
date Chrome and Vivaldi, and they're both the same way.

~~~
azernik
You would need to have an up-to-date font that contains glyphs for these
specific emoji - your computer gets an integer key (a code-point) and needs to
have a scalable image in its lookup table to substitute for it. I have _no_
idea how exactly to get a new one for Windows, sorry :-\

------
guessmyname
I expected this to be the solution for my broken Linux font experience. In
Linux there is no support for Emoji and every time someone uses them in a
website to display so semi-important idea I get frustrated because the only
thing I see is a blank character or a rectangular border. I thought this
service was something like "discover what this non-supported character
actually is" more than "discover what is the meaning of this character".

I know about the existence of alternatives [1][2] but I wish there was native
support for this trend in Linux. And yes, I know emoji is actually an old
thing from Japan companies, but is still a young trend in terms of western
usage.

I wonder how difficult would be to copy all those images from the Apple font
and create a custom TTF so I can get the fancy colored symbols in my computer.
Of course, distribution of that file would be against Apple's copyright (or
maybe not, I don't know) but I don't care.

EDIT1: Actually this is what I was expecting to be; I forgot I had disabled
JavaScript in my browser. Still would like to have an official font with Emoji
support for Linux.

EDIT2: Thanks to gtk40 I found [3] now I can create my own font with those
images.

[1] [https://github.com/eosrei/emojione-color-
font](https://github.com/eosrei/emojione-color-font)

[2] [https://github.com/eosrei/twemoji-color-
font](https://github.com/eosrei/twemoji-color-font)

[3] [http://emojipedia.org/apple/](http://emojipedia.org/apple/)

~~~
pc86
> _I thought this service was something like "discover what this non-supported
> character actually is" more than "discover what is the meaning of this
> character"._

I don't see how when the title starts "I couldn't figure out what an Emoji
meant"

~~~
guessmyname
You are right, I spoke too fast.

If I could downvote my own comments I would do so.

------
gprasanth
whatmoji.com/[the emoji here]

would have have been cool.

~~~
nk-
Cool idea, this should work now: [http://whatmoji.com/](http://whatmoji.com/)

edit: Looks like HN strips emoji so I can't link to it, but you can try it out
by visiting [http://whatmoji.com/TEXT_HERE](http://whatmoji.com/TEXT_HERE)!

~~~
Symbiote
You just need to encode the URL for HN to accept it

[http://whatmoji.com/%F0%9F%8C%8D](http://whatmoji.com/%F0%9F%8C%8D)

------
kwikiel
And it could work also for emoticons. For example ":P" is hard to understand.
Good idea

~~~
labster
Yeah, it's totally hard to understand :P

------
lucb1e
That this website exists probably says enough. I've never heard anyone ask
questions about smileys like MSN or Skype had/have, just those "emoji"s are
often ambiguous and usually too small to see properly from a distance.

------
imakesoft
I like it. It's simple & elegant and does exactly what it promises to do. :)

------
qq66
It would be more interesting if the emoji descriptions were user-generated,
because individual subgroups often use the same emojis to mean different
things (or an emoji just takes on a popular meaning of its own).

------
fallenshell
There was this project called emoji.js I think that you embed in your site and
transforms all emoji it sees into Apple Emoji, the standard, and works for
everyone even without emoji installed. give it a shot.

------
callmeed
Cool but you definitely need to include "alternative" meanings. Consider doing
something like Urban Dictionary so people can find out what the eggplant
_really_ means.

------
reitanqild
The keyboard on my previous phone, a z3, offered emoticons as part of
suggestions while typing.

That was a nifty feature for a stock keyboard.

~~~
saghm
Google Keyboard just started doing that to me, and I can't figure out how to
turn it off...

------
madengr
Here the ones I thought were for sex positions are astrological symbols.

------
exabrial
We are literally reinventing Chinese/Japanese/et all :)

~~~
KON_Air
Those are not pictograph languages.

~~~
umanwizard
But at some point Chinese probably was.

------
WalterBright
It's amusing that people try to replace phonetic spelling with pictograms, and
rediscover that phonetic spelling is better.

For one thing, you can look up spelling in a dictionary. How do you look up a
pictogram?

------
jstoiko
Edit: seems like HN doesn't let you emoji

------
overcast
Urban Dictionary for Emoji?

------
excalibur
I want something like Google Translate, that will take any arbitrary text and
turn it into Emoji. Make it so.

