Copy and paste any emoji

Emoji DB is a reference for every emoji in the Unicode Standard, built to be quicker than the picker already on your device. Search 3,953 glyphs, click one, and it is on your clipboard. Nothing to install, no account, no daily limit.

What separates a database from a picker is everything sitting behind the glyph. Each emoji has its own page carrying its Unicode codepoints, its HTML, CSS and JavaScript escapes, its GitHub, Slack and Discord shortcodes, its skin-tone variants, the release that introduced it, and the official CLDR name Unicode gave it. When you need the emoji name rather than the emoji itself — for a file name, a database column, an alt attribute — that is the page that has it.

Why emoji copy and paste works anywhere

Emoji are characters, not pictures. 😀 is codepoint U+1F600 in the same way that A is U+0041. That is why a copied emoji survives places an image cannot reach: usernames, bios, commit messages, spreadsheet cells, folder names. It is also why the same emoji looks different on your phone and your laptop. You copy the character; each device draws it with its own font, and Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung all draw 😀 differently. None of them is wrong, and none of that drawing is stored here.

Collections people actually search for

The database is organised the way Unicode organises it — nine groups, from Smileys & Emotion through to Flags — and also the way people ask for it, which is rarely the same thing. A request for cute emoji is not a request for a Unicode category; it is a request for small, soft, pastel characters that happen to be scattered across four groups. So alongside the formal taxonomy there are collections for cute, heart, star and aesthetic emoji, each holding the emoji, the kaomoji, the text symbols and the ready-made combos that belong with them.

Emoji DB keeps those four as hand-checked collections rather than saved searches, because a filter cannot tell the difference between an emoji that is cute and an emoji whose CLDR name merely contains the word. The same applies to the star and aesthetic sets, where half of what people want is not an emoji at all but a text symbol sitting in a different part of the standard entirely.

Hearts are the clearest case. Unicode has red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, black, white and pink hearts, plus growing, sparkling, revolving, mending and broken ones, plus the heart suit ♥ and the outlined ♡ that are not emoji at all. Scattered across the standard they are hard to compare; on one page you can see them together and pick the right one.

Symbols are not the same as emoji

★ ➳ ✿ ♡ are plain Unicode characters rather than emoji. They take your font's colour and size instead of arriving as coloured pictures, they never turn into a grey box, and they paste into the many places that strip emoji out — usernames on sites that reject them, plain-text fields, code. There are 5,323 of them here across 42 Unicode blocks, including arrows, dividers, zodiac signs, chess pieces, fractions, box drawing and genuinely invisible characters.

Discord, Slack and GitHub shortcodes

Looking up an emoji for Discord usually means wanting a shortcode rather than a glyph —:heart:,:fire:,:joy:. Every emoji page lists its shortcode per platform, because they disagree more often than people expect: what GitHub calls one thing, Slack frequently calls another, and Discord sometimes accepts both.

Kaomoji and combos

Not everything expressive is an emoji. Kaomoji — ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ — are Japanese text faces assembled from ordinary characters, which is why they work in game chats and usernames where emoji are blocked outright. Combos like ˗ˏˋ ♡ ˎˊ˗ are pre-arranged clusters meant for bios and captions. Both are here, sorted by mood and subject rather than by the characters they happen to contain.

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