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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!

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/

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 :-\",
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
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
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/
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!
patmcguire
They can mean different things based on what set of renderings you're using for the same emoji... good writeup here https://eev.ee/blog/2016/04/12/apple-did-not-invent-emoji/
thaumasiotes
That essay has a good grasp of why we want unicode, but completely missed the point of why we want emoticons. If I send an image to someone, I don't want it to be rendered in an unpredictable way based on their unknown system and font choices. I need to know that they see what I intended to send.

Everyone would be happier if they were embedded images; that's what we all want. They're shoehorned into unicode instead because that makes it technically easier to send them in text messages, not because they're textual objects.

colejohnson66
Technically, you don't know your text will render the same on someone else's device. For all you know, they could have their system font set to Wingdings.
thaumasiotes
I don't care about that (see my comment, "They're shoehorned into unicode instead because that makes it technically easier to send them in text messages, not because they're textual objects"). Text is grouped into several equivalence classes. I only need them to recognize any L that I send as an L.

If I send a facial expression, I need to know what I'm sending. Those do not have defined equivalence classes.

exabrial
We are literally reinventing Chinese/Japanese/et all :)
KON_Air
Those are not pictograph languages.
exabrial
You're right. Sorry for making a joke!!!
umanwizard
But at some point Chinese probably was.
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jstanley
It seems to permanently (?) store all of the input text. Why?

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.
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.

madengr
Here the ones I thought were for sex positions are astrological symbols.
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
agentgt
It would be nice if it supported the ASCII text shortcuts like :poop: (see 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).

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

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.
gtk40
I feel like 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.
OJFord
Yep, that's what I expected to see when I followed the link in OP.
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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.
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

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

[3] 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.

Retr0spectrum
They render fine for me with Firefox on Arch Linux, although they are only black-and-white. Apparently the "Symbola" font is being used.
eosrei
Hi, I made those color SVGinOT emoji fonts.

There are four methods for implementing (multi)color in OpenType fonts:

* Apple's SBIX table - Embedded bitmaps, non-standard, used on OS X.

* Google's CBLC+CBDT - Embedded bitmaps, part of OpenType spec, used on Android.

* Microsoft's COLR+CPAL - Colored glyphs, part of OpenType spec, used in Windows.

* Adobe/Mozilla/W3C's SVG+CPAL - SVG in OpenType (SVGinOT), part of OpenType spec, works in Firefox/Thunderbird.

I chose to use SVGinOT because it is the only out-of-the-box option for color font support on Linux right now. I plan to make both CBLC+CBDT and SBIX versions in the future.

> I wish there was native support for this trend in Linux

There is an unmaintained patch for Cairo to support Google's bitmap CBDT+CBLC OpenType format.[1] It needs to be updated and completed for "official" Linux support.[2] Behdad has many other things to do, so please do not open an issue against that fork. Long term, I expect support for both CBDT+CBLC and SVGinOT.

> 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.

It is possible to create a CBDT/CBLC version of the Apple Color Emoji font, but the font is, as you suspected, unlicensed[3].

[1]: https://github.com/behdad/cairo/tree/color-emoji

[2]: https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-emoji/issues/36

[3]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22337295/license-of-apple...

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