About FaceMoji — Emoji Names, Meanings and Rendering

FaceMoji is a plain-English reference for emoji and emoticon faces — what each one is actually called, what it tends to mean, and where it renders differently from what you expected.

FaceMoji.net is independent and NOT affiliated with the Facemoji keyboard app or its developer, nor with Unicode, Apple, Google or Samsung. The name is ours; the app is a different product.

Start with the Emoji faces page, or browse emoji faces by feeling.

Last updated: 8 October 2026 · Published by the FaceMoji editorial team

Who publishes this

The site is maintained by the FaceMoji editorial team. There is no named-expert byline here and no stock photograph of one, because inventing a person to make a page look authoritative is a lie about the easiest thing on the page to check. What we offer instead is a description of the method and a real mailbox on the contact page.

The problem this site exists for

An emoji is a single character, and it is drawn by whatever the reader’s device decides it should look like. That one fact causes most of the confusion people arrive with.

The same code point can be a warm smile on one platform and a strained grimace on another. A face that reads as friendly on your phone can land as sarcastic on the phone it arrives at, because the two vendors drew it differently. Nobody involved did anything wrong — the character is identical, the picture is not.

Meaning drifts too, and faster than the standard does. The formal Unicode name of a character is fixed at the moment it is encoded; how people actually use it keeps moving, sometimes in the opposite direction. A page that gives you only the official name is technically correct and practically useless.

What we publish

For a face worth a page, we try to cover four things: what the character is formally called and where it sits in the standard; how it is commonly used now, including where usage has moved away from the name; where it renders differently enough to change the message; and how to copy it so it survives the paste.

The third is where most of the value is, and it is the one that requires actually looking rather than reading a code chart.

Where the data comes from

Character names and code points come from the Unicode Standard itself, never from another emoji site. Copying is how a wrong name spreads: one site publishes it, others repeat it because it is already visible, and years later everyone uses it without a single person having opened the code chart.

Notes on how a character renders come from looking at it on real devices, because there is no register to check appearance against — vendors design their own artwork and change it between releases.

What we will not do

We do not invent usage statistics. “The most used emoji of 2026” is the kind of number that is easy to write and impossible for us to measure, and a fabricated figure is worse than no figure.

We do not assert a single authoritative meaning for a face whose usage is genuinely contested. Where two readings are both common, saying so is more useful than picking one and sounding confident.

What happens when you copy

Copying itself happens in your browser. On the emoji list pages, the site also adds one to an anonymous weekly counter for the face you copied, so popular faces can be shown first; no name, account or IP address is stored with that count. The privacy policy lists everything the site collects.

Contact

A character we have named wrongly, a meaning that has shifted, a face that renders unexpectedly on a device we have not seen: the contact page reaches a real mailbox. Corrections are the most useful mail we get, because platform artwork changes and we cannot check every device every release.

FAQ

Who runs FaceMoji.net?

The FaceMoji editorial team. We do not publish under invented names, and the site is not connected to the Facemoji keyboard app.

How are faces and renders checked?

Character names and code points come from the Unicode Standard. How a face looks is checked on real devices, and each rendering note says which platform it describes.

How do I suggest a face?

Email [email protected] with the face, what you use it for and where you saw it. Approved faces join the grid with the date they were added. You can also contact us for corrections.