How Emojis Work Under the Hood: A Unicode Primer
Every emoji is defined by the Unicode standard. Here is how they work technically, from code points to platform rendering. Every emoji you have ever sent or received is defined by a unique number in the Unicode standard called a code point. The grinning face emoji is U+1F600, the heart is U+2764. When your device wants to display an emoji, it looks up this code point in its font files and renders the corresponding glyph. I remember the first time I debugged an emoji bug in a chat application and realized that the entire system rests on this one lookup table. It sounds simple until you dig into edge cases. How Code Points Work A code point is a number assigned to a character in the Unicode standard. The notation U+ followed by hexadecimal digits identifies each character. Basic Latin letters occupy the range U+0020 to U+007E. Emoji code points start at U+1F300 and extend through several ranges. The Unicode Consortium, the body that maintains the standard, reviews and approves new emoji proposals twice a year. When you type an emoji, your device sends the code point as text. The recipient device receives the same code point and looks up the corresponding glyph in its own emoji font. This is why the same emoji looks different on Apple, Google, and Microsoft devices. Read the full article on Emoji Reference, and copy any emoji mentioned from the catalog of 1303+ entries on the home page.