Show HN: I couldn't figure out what an Emoji meant, so I made WhatMoji.com | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I couldn't figure out what an Emoji meant, so I made WhatMoji.com

whatmoji.com

143 pointsnk-76 comments

I feel like http://emojipedia.org/ is a better website with more information. I've been regularly using it since Emoji have become a thing. It gives more context about the meaning of symbols, is easier to search the other way, and also shows how the image appears on various different platforms.

Emojipedia doesn't say anything about alternative meanings for the peach or eggplant emojis. I need something for more cultural meanings, too.

Neither does whatmoji, though.

Taco: http://whatmoji.com/?i=21c542c341eb67e1cb7a4ba4a21052ff

Eggplant: http://whatmoji.com/?i=376bf089b6f3e4f4eb7e9e13c4ce1cb2

peach: http://whatmoji.com/?i=1633b26bb2deb796dab3660132424995

http://emojipedia.org/peach/

> Also Known as Butt Emoji

http://emojipedia.org/aubergine/

> Also Known as Phallic Emoji

UrbanEmojipedia?

Yep, that's what I expected to see when I followed the link in OP.

It still doesn't really tell you what it means, just the name/annotation.

True, but it does give you a hint at least. I would have never guessed that this was a shrimp for example: http://whatmoji.com/?i=b65555fbf55380ec0970a060b2457527

Except so many of them are culturally specific, like the horn emoji on the front page has roots in postal systems (both in Japan and Europe). This page doesn't tell you that. Even this random website does a better job of giving context: http://emojipedia.org/postal-horn/

Well, Emoji are originally Japanese so you always have to keep that in mind.

The point is "what is this emoji?" Knowing emoji started in Japan still doesn't tell you what the emoji is or means!

They can mean different things based on what set of renderings you're using for the same emoji... good writeup here https://eev.ee/blog/2016/04/12/apple-did-not-invent-emoji/

That essay has a good grasp of why we want unicode, but completely missed the point of why we want emoticons. If I send an image to someone, I don't want it to be rendered in an unpredictable way based on their unknown system and font choices. I need to know that they see what I intended to send.

Everyone would be happier if they were embedded images; that's what we all want. They're shoehorned into unicode instead because that makes it technically easier to send them in text messages, not because they're textual objects.

Technically, you don't know your text will render the same on someone else's device. For all you know, they could have their system font set to Wingdings.

I don't care about that (see my comment, "They're shoehorned into unicode instead because that makes it technically easier to send them in text messages, not because they're textual objects"). Text is grouped into several equivalence classes. I only need them to recognize any L that I send as an L.

If I send a facial expression, I need to know what I'm sending. Those do not have defined equivalence classes.

Quick tip if you are on OS X: Pressing ctrl+command+space pops up an emoji bank so you can enter them in any text field. Now you don't have to hunt for emojis to put in the website.

Love the website btw!

I tend to copy and paste from Emacs, so I can search for emoji and other Unicode characters by name with C-x 8 RET.

you can also autocomplete emojis in emacs

https://github.com/syohex/emacs-ac-emoji https://github.com/dunn/company-emoji

and display them as well

https://github.com/iqbalansari/emacs-emojify

And yes, I know I could have just looked it up in many different ways.

But any programmer knows that an elaborate solution that takes a day of programming is a lot more fun than a 1-minute fix that just solves the problem at hand!

> But any programmer knows that an elaborate solution that takes a day of programming is a lot more fun than a 1-minute fix that just solves the problem at hand!

Don't put that on your CV/resumé

I lol'ed!

It would be cool if you could allow for user commenting/voting so that people could add and build up cultural context for them rather than just having the spec definition. If you got enough of a community around that it could become very useful. Kinda like Urban Dictionary for Emoji.

It would be nice if it supported the ASCII text shortcuts like :poop: (see http://www.emoji-cheat-sheet.com/).

You could also make the URL route based on the ascii shortcut as well (as previously mentioned by another user).

Reading this article sent me on a whirlwind of Wikipediaing and Googling...just like Unicode itself is vastly complicated, so is the thought and design behind emojis, which have their own technical subcommittee [0], currently chaired by Apple and Google employees.

One of the best articles I came across is from Huffington Post, before the inclusion of multi-colored faces in 2015:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/27/emoji-meaning_n_553...

I knew that trying to design universally readable iconography is an essentially impossible task in itself, but the article brings up a lot of other interesting issues, such as the worry that Apple might take it upon themselves to revamp their emojis which were designed before the "flat" days:

> By comparison, Apple’s iconic emoji are horribly out of fashion. Its icons have shadows, depth and a three-dimensional look that’s a holdover from the Steve Jobs era of skeuomorphic design. Flat illustration free of texture or highlights is now de rigeur. Apple has already abandoned the faux-wood paneling and leather elsewhere in its software, and its emoji could change at any time — potentially a rude shock for those who’ve come to identify with the brand’s symbols. “I kind of hope they don’t [change it],” said Van Lancker.

Even the HTML of the article itself contains interesting insights, especially about web production and the challenges of digital preservation. I thought at first that, in a decade, the opening paragraph might completely lose its meaning...but then I opened up my web inspector:

http://imgur.com/YUVtwPe

[0] http://unicode.org/emoji/

It seems to permanently (?) store all of the input text. Why?

http://whatmoji.com/?i=da510f5876a15885fa89de8abe731d3c

EDIT: OK, so it stores only the emojis. The actual text is removed.

Yes, it stores the list of emojis so that you can link to it. The text is never stored.

Are you concerned this might be a privacy issue? I could change it to only store searches on demand.

That was my concern at first, but I don't think it's an issue if it doesn't store the entire text.

I ran into this problem in a side project recently and made a package to programmatically fix it: https://github.com/NarroApp/translate-emoji

Nice work!

You could even go further using algorithms like Sense2Vec (https://spacy.io/demos/sense2vec?%3B%29|NOUN). They are able to figure out similarities between emojis and between emojis and words.

Instagram team did it:

http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/117889701472/em...

I didn't know that existed. Thanks for the tip!

I believe an emoji dictionary is only helpful if emoji senders universally rely and agree upon its definitions.

I find myself confused by emojis from time to time, and for me the confusion doesn't stem from misunderstanding the emoji's expression, it stems from what the emoji means within the context of the conversation and my relationship with the sender.

Emojis can lessen ambiguity when they're used to complement a message or communicate tone. I believe they increase ambiguity, however, when they're used to replace words altogether.

http://whatmoji.com/?i=148391ab065fc0104c28dbc67913f335

I thought this was a high five...

I installed the Debian package "unicode", which will accept an emoji as an argument and print the Unicode description.

It also searches the descriptions, if given a word as an argument.

I believe emoji is designed to be expressive, if we need to look it up in a emoji dictionary ,then emoji goes wrong. The fact is that everybody wants to add their favourite emoji, but more emoji added more confusion it will be make. Just imagine we lookup an emoji before we send to others, and the receiver has to look it up in a dictionary to know what the sender want to express. Why not just using the normal words we already know very well

>Why not just using the normal words we already know very well

A persons answer to that can be "I don't know. I think we should just use the normal words we already know very well" yet still have to life in the current reality of many people using emojis. Hence OP's service.

Good site. ..funny that programmers & cell phone carriers are re-inventing Chinese-style (pictorial language)

Nice! One little thing is that it really doesn't describe skin tones well: http://i.imgur.com/dGg1026.png

I wish this went deeper. Emoji are like the symbols on the alethiometer.

A+ reference. Also I would 100% download an emoji alethiometer app.

Ah, but what does 🈚️ mean? :)

WhatMoji doesn't recognize it; Emojipedia doesn't either; and Google returns zero results. Some of the original imported Softbank characters are arcane. These are the ones I want to look up—not because the meaning is vaguely between two possible semantic clusters, but because I literally have no idea how to even describe the character to search for it.

Maybe that's just a Chinese character? It looks like the character for "nothing" (無) enclosed in a box.

Part of the problem is that the character you pasted is made up of two code points (I don't know if I have the terminology right here):

http://apps.timwhitlock.info/unicode/inspect?s=%F0%9F%88%9A%...

It's both the character plus a "variation selector".:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variation_Selectors_(Unicode_b...

If you search for the character by itself ( 🈚 ) you get results on google:

https://www.google.com/search?q=🈚

Just an FYI, my workplace McAfee Gateway filters this site due to "Violence"(??!). Not sure what you have to do to get off that list.

This looks very similar to http://emojipedia.org/

Would be nice if you provided a bank of emojis so I wouldn't have to go to another source in order to copy and paste them in.

The idea behind the site was that you would see an emoji on a website somewhere and couldn't figure out what it meant. So the main "use case" I have in mind is indeed someone copy/pasting them from somewhere else.

What would you like to do that would require a bank of emojis on the site itself?

A bank would be useful for general learning. i.e. when I went to the site just now, I didn't have a specific emoji that I needed to identify, but if there had been a 'bank of emojis' I probably would have wasted a few minutes of my day reading about what they mean...because I frequently have no idea what emojis mean...

And by wasted I mean I wouldn't have been working. Not a jab at your project :)

I see - I just added links to lists of most emojis to the header: http://whatmoji.com/

I hope this helps you waste a few minutes! :)

I'm not really up on how text rendering works; what's it mean if I can see some of those, but not others? e.g. I have Rocket but not Helicopter; not Steam Locomotive but Railway Car and High-Speed Train; Taxi and Automobile but not their Oncoming variants; Toilet, Water Closet, and Bath but not Shower.

Is there something I need to install, or something? I'm on Win7 with up-to-date Chrome and Vivaldi, and they're both the same way.

You would need to have an up-to-date font that contains glyphs for these specific emoji - your computer gets an integer key (a code-point) and needs to have a scalable image in its lookup table to substitute for it. I have no idea how exactly to get a new one for Windows, sorry :-\

I expected this to be the solution for my broken Linux font experience. In Linux there is no support for Emoji and every time someone uses them in a website to display so semi-important idea I get frustrated because the only thing I see is a blank character or a rectangular border. I thought this service was something like "discover what this non-supported character actually is" more than "discover what is the meaning of this character".

I know about the existence of alternatives [1][2] but I wish there was native support for this trend in Linux. And yes, I know emoji is actually an old thing from Japan companies, but is still a young trend in terms of western usage.

I wonder how difficult would be to copy all those images from the Apple font and create a custom TTF so I can get the fancy colored symbols in my computer. Of course, distribution of that file would be against Apple's copyright (or maybe not, I don't know) but I don't care.

EDIT1: Actually this is what I was expecting to be; I forgot I had disabled JavaScript in my browser. Still would like to have an official font with Emoji support for Linux.

EDIT2: Thanks to gtk40 I found [3] now I can create my own font with those images.

[1] https://github.com/eosrei/emojione-color-font

[2] https://github.com/eosrei/twemoji-color-font

[3] http://emojipedia.org/apple/

Hi, I made those color SVGinOT emoji fonts.

There are four methods for implementing (multi)color in OpenType fonts:

* Apple's SBIX table - Embedded bitmaps, non-standard, used on OS X.

* Google's CBLC+CBDT - Embedded bitmaps, part of OpenType spec, used on Android.

* Microsoft's COLR+CPAL - Colored glyphs, part of OpenType spec, used in Windows.

* Adobe/Mozilla/W3C's SVG+CPAL - SVG in OpenType (SVGinOT), part of OpenType spec, works in Firefox/Thunderbird.

I chose to use SVGinOT because it is the only out-of-the-box option for color font support on Linux right now. I plan to make both CBLC+CBDT and SBIX versions in the future.

> I wish there was native support for this trend in Linux

There is an unmaintained patch for Cairo to support Google's bitmap CBDT+CBLC OpenType format.[1] It needs to be updated and completed for "official" Linux support.[2] Behdad has many other things to do, so please do not open an issue against that fork. Long term, I expect support for both CBDT+CBLC and SVGinOT.

> I wonder how difficult would be to copy all those images from the Apple font and create a custom TTF so I can get the fancy colored symbols in my computer.

It is possible to create a CBDT/CBLC version of the Apple Color Emoji font, but the font is, as you suspected, unlicensed[3].

[1]: https://github.com/behdad/cairo/tree/color-emoji

[2]: https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-emoji/issues/36

[3]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22337295/license-of-apple...

They render fine for me with Firefox on Arch Linux, although they are only black-and-white. Apparently the "Symbola" font is being used.

> I thought this service was something like "discover what this non-supported character actually is" more than "discover what is the meaning of this character".

I don't see how when the title starts "I couldn't figure out what an Emoji meant"

You are right, I spoke too fast.

If I could downvote my own comments I would do so.

whatmoji.com/[the emoji here]

would have have been cool.

Cool idea, this should work now: http://whatmoji.com/

edit: Looks like HN strips emoji so I can't link to it, but you can try it out by visiting http://whatmoji.com/TEXT_HERE!

You just need to encode the URL for HN to accept it

http://whatmoji.com/%F0%9F%8C%8D

And it could work also for emoticons. For example ":P" is hard to understand. Good idea

Yeah, it's totally hard to understand :P

That this website exists probably says enough. I've never heard anyone ask questions about smileys like MSN or Skype had/have, just those "emoji"s are often ambiguous and usually too small to see properly from a distance.

I like it. It's simple & elegant and does exactly what it promises to do. :)

It would be more interesting if the emoji descriptions were user-generated, because individual subgroups often use the same emojis to mean different things (or an emoji just takes on a popular meaning of its own).

There was this project called emoji.js I think that you embed in your site and transforms all emoji it sees into Apple Emoji, the standard, and works for everyone even without emoji installed. give it a shot.

Cool but you definitely need to include "alternative" meanings. Consider doing something like Urban Dictionary so people can find out what the eggplant really means.

The keyboard on my previous phone, a z3, offered emoticons as part of suggestions while typing.

That was a nifty feature for a stock keyboard.

Google Keyboard just started doing that to me, and I can't figure out how to turn it off...

Here the ones I thought were for sex positions are astrological symbols.

We are literally reinventing Chinese/Japanese/et all :)

Those are not pictograph languages.

But at some point Chinese probably was.

You're right. Sorry for making a joke!!!

It's amusing that people try to replace phonetic spelling with pictograms, and rediscover that phonetic spelling is better.

For one thing, you can look up spelling in a dictionary. How do you look up a pictogram?

Edit: seems like HN doesn't let you emoji

Urban Dictionary for Emoji?

I want something like Google Translate, that will take any arbitrary text and turn it into Emoji. Make it so.

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