Smileys Emojis
The Smileys category is the heart of the Emoji Reference catalog: 89 emojis, organized into 11 subcategories — Face Smiling (13), Face Affection (7), Face Tongue (6), Face Hand (7), Face Neutral (15), Face Sleepy (3), Face Sad (10), Face Angry (4), Face Negative (5), Face Costume (10), Cat Face (9) — covering every facial expression the Unicode standard offers. It is also the category people search hardest, because faces do most of the emotional work in messaging: when someone wants to soften a sentence, react to news, or signal irony, the answer is almost always here. The subcategory structure exists because "smileys" is not one mood but a spectrum, and the groups map to intents: the 13 faces of Face Smiling run from a polite grin to the 😂 Face with Tears of Joy, the internet's default laughter signal; Face Affection gathers 🥰 Smiling Face with Hearts, 😍 Smiling Face with Heart-Eyes, 🤩 Star-Struck, 😘 Face Blowing a Kiss for warmth and admiration; Face Neutral carries the fifteen restrained expressions — the raised eyebrow, the expressionless stare — that do the heavy lifting in dry humor; and Face Negative holds the horned faces and the 💀 Skull, whose slang meaning has drifted furthest from its picture. Around those sit the tongue-out faces for playfulness, the hand-covering faces for embarrassment and oops moments, the sad, angry, and sleepy groups for everything the day can throw at you, ten costume faces from clowns to ogres for Halloween energy, and nine cat faces that mirror the human set — a favorite of people who find the human expressions too earnest. Choosing within the category is easier by intent than by scrolling: start from the mood you want to send, open the matching subcategory, and compare the close variants, because near-identical faces often differ in exactly the register that matters — slightly smiling versus beaming, relieved versus sleepy. Two catalog tools help at that step: the compare tool puts any two faces side by side with their keywords and code points, and every emoji page — like the tears-of-joy and skull pages — explains where a glyph's meaning has drifted from its official name. For the full story on misread faces, the emoji meanings guide is the companion read. If you are deciding between two faces here, remember that meaning shifts by audience as well as by glyph — the same face can read friendly in one chat and passive-aggressive in another — and when in doubt, the plainer smile is the safer send. Every emoji on this page copies with one click.