Facebook Emojis

Emojis for Facebook

Hello! Welcome to Facebook Emojis - one of the most complete lists of Facebook emojis (or "Facebook emoji", depending on your pluralisation preference) on the internet. Facebook Emojis is not official. It's just a handy cheatsheet that some guy made for facebook emojis. Each of the items you see above has 3 sections: the first is the emoji as displayed on facebook, the second is the raw unicode symbol which is used to create that emoji, and the third is a list of tags which you can use to search and filter the emoji collection. If both the Facebook emoji and the raw unicode symbol are the same, then this means that facebook doesn't have it's own particular symbol, and so the web-browser's version of the emoji will be rendered. You can still use this type of emoji on facebook, but just be aware that they may be rendered differently depending on the viewer's browser/device/OS.

What's the difference between an emoji and an emoticon on Facebook (or anywhere)? Well, it's quite simple: The term "emoticon" is mostly used to describe small icons that specifically describe emotions - so they consist mostly of icons which resemble faces: angry faces, sad faces and blushing faces, for example. Emojis on the other hand can represent anything. They're just small symbols which represent some concept, object, person, action, or almost anything else. The term emoji is similar to the concepts of ideogram and pictogram which have been used by humans as an element of formal language for thousands of years (from rock paintings, to hieroglyphics, to road signs). Emojis as we know them today (now included in almost all major social networks: Facebook, SnapChat, Google+, Twitter, etc.) originated some time during the 1990s with several Japanese mobile phone companies realising that ASCII symbols (kaomoji) were being used quite frequently in communication. This led to a man named Shigetaka Kurita (who was working at one of these companies) creating a set of 180 symbols which were inspired by street signs, chinese characters and the symbols used to display information about the weather. Fast forward a decade or two, and emojis are used almost everywhere - and hence the demand for a website that compiles a list of them for a particular social network!

Are emojis ruining written English (or communication in general)? Ever since the development of formalised writing systems, people have been critiquing change. The current "emoji revolution" is no different. In fact, is seems that emojis are very rapidly filling a huge now-apparent void in written communication - and it all has to do with "discourse markers". Discourse markers give use information about the context of a statement. Before emoji, the discourse markers of English were limited to "frankly", "on the other hand", "basically" and a few others. So emojis have become a limitless source of "context markers", communicating a lot of information in a very succinct manner. If this stuff interests you, you should check out this article.

Secret emojis on facebook? There are a bunch of facebook pages, blog posts, and websites which talk about "secret emojis" on Facebook. I'm not sure what they're referring to, because unicode has never been a secret. All the emojis listed above are just part of the unicode standard and aren't really "easter eggs" or anything like that. That said, there are a few actual secret emojis like ":putnam:" and the shark emoji: "(^^^)", but it's not clear whether these work anymore on all devices, so they were not included in this list.

Why didn't you include the basic Facebook emojis? The original set of Facebook emojis which get created by typing in emoji shortcuts like ":)" and ":D" are not included in this list. This is simply because they are treated inconsistently across different devices. Even the plain ":)" is treated completely different on iPhone vs. the web browser. If there's demand, I may eventually add these (and just use the most ubiquitous icon as the display image), but in the mean time you can google "facebook emoji shortcuts" and you should be able to easily find a list. This website's primary goal is to list all the unicode-based emojis for facebook.

Random note about pluralisation: The term "emojis" seems to be on the rise as a pluralisation of "emoji", but "emoji" is still the most popular. I chose to call this site facebook emojis because I'm a fan of consitency in a language (conjugation, pluralisation, etc.) - mainly so it's easier and more accessible to those who want learn it as a second language. Weird rules are fun for grammar police, but not so fun if you're a kid who's just trying to learn English as a second language so you can get a higher paying job. Basically, it seems to me that irregular language rules give rise to a sort of literary elitism that's damaging to English as a candidate "universal tongue".

Why are some of the emojis black and white when I paste them into Facebook? Facebook hasn't got emojis for all of the unicode emoji symbols that currently exist. Currently there are over 1000 unicode symbols which are roughly classed as emoji. Facebook has got coloured icons for around 400 of these. So if an emoji appears as a black and white symbol, then it just means that it's not yet implemented by Facebook. That doesn't mean you can't use it though! I'll be updating this page whenever facebook releases more emojis, so bookmark this page and check it every now and then if you want to be on top of your "emoji game".