How to copy and paste emoji
- Find the emoji. Scroll the categories or search in plain English: laugh, heart, party, thank you, pizza. The search reads each emoji's official name and its keywords, so lol finds 😂 and fire finds 🔥.
- Click it. The emoji is copied to your clipboard, and the panel shows its name, when it was added to Unicode and its codes.
- Paste it with Ctrl+V on Windows, Cmd+V on a Mac, or press and hold in the text box on a phone and choose Paste.
Every emoji you click is also added to Your collection, so you can build a whole line, such as 🎉🥂✨, and copy it with one click. Your recent emoji are kept under Recent on this device for next time. With a keyboard, Tab into a grid, move with the arrow keys and press Enter to copy.
Skin tones
Emoji of people and hands come in a default yellow and five skin tones. Choose a tone above the grid and every emoji that supports it switches, here and in what you copy. The page remembers your choice on this device.
The five tones are separate characters, U+1F3FB to U+1F3FF, based on the Fitzpatrick scale used in dermatology. Unicode added them in 2015. A tone is not a new emoji: it is a modifier placed right after the base emoji, and the two together form one picture. Paste 👍🏽 into a device that is too old to combine them and you see the thumb followed by a square of color.
330 emoji accept a tone. For emoji with two people, such as 🤝 or 💑, the selector gives both people the same tone. Unicode also defines mixed pairs, which your phone's emoji keyboard can type.
Why emoji look different on every phone
Unicode decides which emoji exist, their code and their name. It does not draw them. Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft and apps such as WhatsApp each design their own set, so the same 😂 is a slightly different face on an iPhone, an Android phone and a Windows laptop. What you copy here is the character, and the reader always sees it in their own device's style.
That also explains the two common glitches:
- An empty box or a question mark. The reader's device is older than the emoji. The newest set, Emoji 17.0 from 2025, added eight new emoji, including distorted face, orca and treasure chest, and they appear only after a system update. This page hides emoji your own device cannot draw yet and says how many, with a link to show them anyway.
- Two emoji instead of one. Many emoji are built from several, joined by an invisible character called a zero width joiner. ❤️🔥 heart on fire is a red heart, the joiner and fire. A device that does not know the combination shows the parts side by side.
Using emoji in posts and marketing
Emoji are short, but they carry tone, and they are read differently by different people and devices. A few habits keep them working for you:
- Add, do not replace. Put the emoji next to the word, not instead of it. Screen readers announce every emoji by its name, so 🔥🔥🔥 is read aloud as "fire, fire, fire".
- Put them at the end. An emoji at the end of a line or sentence reads as tone. In the middle of a sentence it interrupts it, for people and for screen readers.
- Check the name before you post. The official name in the panel often settles what an emoji means. 🙏 is folded hands, used for please and thank you as well as prayer.
- Test where it matters. In email subject lines and ads, check the emoji on an older phone and in the email clients your customers use before you send.
Emoji in HTML, CSS and email
A web page saved as UTF-8 can contain emoji directly, so you can paste them into your HTML, your CMS or your email builder. If a system mangles them, use the code from the panel instead: the HTML box gives a numeric reference such as 😂, which works in any HTML, and the CSS box gives the escape for a content string.
Some emoji are more than one code point. The panel lists all of them, including the invisible U+FE0F that asks for the color emoji style and the U+200D joiners inside combined emoji. Copy the whole code, or the emoji may change or split in two.
Methodology and limits
- Data
- Every fully qualified emoji in Unicode Emoji 17.0, with its English short name and keywords from the Unicode CLDR project, read from the open emojibase-data package (version 17.0.0, MIT license). The 9 component characters (the five skin tone swatches and four hair styles) are left out because they are not used on their own. That gives 1,914 emoji, or 3,944 counting every skin tone version, in the nine standard Unicode categories and in Unicode's own order.
- Search
- Matches every word you type against the name, the CLDR keywords and the category. Results that start with your word come first. Pasting an emoji or typing its code point (1F602) also finds it.
- Skin tones
- The selector swaps each emoji for its version with one Fitzpatrick modifier, as listed in the data. For emoji with two people, both get the same tone.
- Device check
- When the page opens, your browser draws a few emoji from each Unicode version in a hidden canvas. Versions your device cannot draw are hidden, with a note and a link to show them. Flags are not tested, because Windows shows country flags as two letters by design.
- Version and year
- The panel shows the Emoji version that added each emoji and the year it was released, following Unicode's emoji version history. Versions 0.6 and 0.7 are characters from Unicode 6.0 (2010) and 7.0 (2014) that were counted as emoji when emoji versions started in 2015.
- Privacy
- Copying uses your browser's Clipboard API. Your recent emoji and skin tone are kept in local storage on this device only. A cookieless usage event records that the tool was used, never what you copied.
- Limits
- We cannot change how the reader's device draws an emoji, and some apps replace emoji with their own pictures. Animated emoji are images or stickers inside each app, not characters, so they cannot be copied as text.
Sources
- Unicode Technical Standard #51: Unicode Emoji, Unicode Consortium, on emoji sequences, skin tone modifiers and presentation
- Unicode Emoji Charts, Unicode Consortium, the full lists and counts by version
- Unicode CLDR Project, Unicode Consortium, the source of the English emoji names and keywords
- Emojibase, Miles Johnson (MIT license), the open package the data is read from
- Using character escapes in markup and CSS, W3C Internationalization