(Ever try to look up an icon in a dictionary? This puts paid to the idea that icons are decipherable by people who don't know the language. Copyrighting the icons makes even that infinitely worse, as it prevents standardization.)
http://ce.linedict.com/dict.html#/cnen/home
See the paintbrush next to the magnifying glass in the search field.
Really useful when you want to use "that squiggly thingy" but don't know the TeX command.
In the modern era the use of pictographs has become Chinese's Achilles' heel: the hanzi are not sortable. The very things that define the Chinese are what makes it stupidly difficult to get computers to grok the language.
There's more than one ordering of the radicals, and choices to be made when characters have the same radical and the same number of strokes
Paper dictionaries are very thumbable though, the current radical is usually highlighted in a way that makes it easy to flick through and find what you need
Consider all the icons used for "print" as if the letters P R I N T are unclear. Even for non-english speakers, it's trivial to look up the word in a dictionary, and impossible to look up the icon. Ditto for replacing "ON" with |. It's just madness.
> and emoji.
Perhaps their recent appearance in Unicode, and the several screens of them that appeared on my iphone texting app.