Emoji Picker
Searchable emoji palette by name and keyword. Click any emoji to copy. Categories: smileys, animals, food, travel, objects, symbols, flags.
What is this for?
Operating systems all ship emoji pickers (Win+. on Windows, Cmd+Ctrl+Space on macOS, the keyboard on phones), but they're inconsistent, sometimes hidden, and often slow. This tool gives you a curated grid of the most-used emoji organised by category and searchable by keyword. Click any tile to copy the emoji to your clipboard. Recently-copied emoji are remembered between visits in browser-local storage — nothing is sent to a server.
When to use it
- You're on a desktop without a quick OS-level emoji shortcut.
- You want a keyword search wider than your OS picker offers.
- You're using a remote desktop or older system that has no native picker.
- You need an emoji to paste into a text field that doesn't accept your IME.
How rendering works
An emoji is just one or more Unicode code points. How it looks depends on the font your browser/OS picks: Apple's emoji are different from Google's Noto, Microsoft's Segoe UI Emoji, and Twitter's Twemoji. The bytes are identical — the picture is local. If an emoji shows as a square or a fallback "unsupported", your system font doesn't have a glyph for it; updating the OS or installing a font like Noto Color Emoji fixes it.
Common gotchas
- Skin tones and family/profession variants are sequences. 👨🍳 is "man" + ZWJ + "cooking" — five code points. Some systems display the components individually if they don't support the sequence.
- Flags are regional indicators. 🇬🇧 is "🇬" + "🇧" — two regional-indicator letters. Sequences for territories (Scotland, Texas) need extra tag characters and may not render on every system.
- This tool is curated, not exhaustive. Unicode 15 has 3,664 emoji including hundreds of skin-tone and gender variants. The picker focuses on the ~600 you're most likely to want; for the full list, see Unicode's emoji data or your OS picker.
- Some characters look like emoji but render as text. The "variation selector" (U+FE0F) tells the renderer "draw this as emoji". Without it, ☂ might render as plain text rather than 🌂. The tool includes the selectors where needed.
- Clipboard support varies. Some browsers' clipboard API needs a user gesture (the click does that), but a permission denial will silently fail. If copying doesn't work, use the keyboard shortcut to copy from the address bar instead.