How we make this site

This page explains where every kind of information on EmojiKite comes from, what we wrote ourselves, and what we have not been able to check yet. If you find a mistake, write to us: corrections are the most useful mail we get.

Characters, names and versions

Code points, official English names, blocks and the Unicode version that introduced each character come from the Unicode Character Database 18.0.0: UnicodeData.txt, Blocks.txt and DerivedAge.txt. Emoji, their groups and skin-tone variants come from emoji-test.txt of the same release. Look-alike characters on symbol pages come from confusables.txt (Unicode security data).

Names in each language and the search keywords come from Unicode CLDR 48.2.0 (annotations). CLDR has no names for some characters and none yet for the newest emoji, so those get no page in that language rather than an invented name.

Names of characters that Unicode defines by a rule instead of a list, such as CJK ideographs and Hangul syllables, are computed with the rule from the Unicode standard. HTML entity names come from the WHATWG HTML standard. Alt codes come from Microsoft’s code page 437 and 1252 mapping tables published by Unicode.

Names people actually search

A CLDR name is sometimes not the word people type: the official name of ♥ is “black heart suit”. For the 296 symbols that have their own page, our editors chose the title in each of the twelve languages from real search data, and kept the official Unicode name and the CLDR name on the page as well. Short editorial paragraphs were written for the most searched symbols; every Alt code and Option shortcut in them is checked by a script against the layout data.

Symbols are grouped into 36 sets (hearts, arrows, stars, math and so on). The grouping and order are our own editorial choice.

Keyboard shortcuts

Windows AltGr tables for the German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish and Turkish layouts were exported from Microsoft’s own layout files (via kbdlayout.info). The Mac shortcuts were read directly from the US keyboard layout of macOS with Apple’s keyboard API, not copied from lists. The Korean ㅁ + 한자 key table comes from the libhangul project, which reproduces the Microsoft IME symbol table.

Japanese IME readings and phone long-press menus were compiled from public documentation. We show a method only where we have a source for it; a symbol without a verified method simply shows fewer methods.

Fancy text

The 41 fancy-text styles are not fonts. They swap ordinary letters for Unicode characters that look styled, such as the mathematical bold and script alphabets. The tables are built from the official character names, and tests check that every output character is assigned in Unicode 18.0.0. Where a style has no letter for something (small caps has no q), the plain letter stays. Accents are kept, never dropped.

Kaomoji

Our 870 kaomoji in 24 categories were written by our own editors. Nothing was copied from another kaomoji site or app. About 350 faces were typed by hand; the rest were composed from our own sets of arms, cheeks, eyes and mouths, and checked for duplicates. Very well-known faces such as the shrug or the table flip are a shared convention, and our versions are our own.

Emoji

The 1923 emoji come from Unicode’s emoji-test.txt, with names in each language from CLDR. How an emoji looks depends on your phone or computer, not on us: Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung each draw their own.

App and game limits

Character limits for names and bios are shown only when we read them on the platform’s own help page, with the date we checked and a link to the source. Where no official number exists, we show none rather than repeat a guess.

Still waiting for real-device checks

Some facts can only be confirmed on a real device, and we have not done all of these checks yet: the AltGr shortcuts on Windows, the Mac shortcuts in Keyboard Viewer, the Korean ㅁ + 한자 table on Windows 11, Japanese IME readings on Windows and macOS, long-press menus on iPhone and Gboard, how each fancy-text style displays on iPhone, Android and Windows and inside Instagram and TikTok, and whether a few rare kaomoji characters show as boxes on older Android phones.

Until then, pages say “may look different on your device” where it matters, and every symbol page has a live check that shows whether your own device can display the character.

Corrections

When a reader reports a mistake, we check it against the source above and fix the data, not only the page, so the fix reaches every language. Send corrections to contact@emojikite.com.