About GetMoji
GetMoji is a reference for emoji and Unicode characters. You can search it, copy from it, and leave — there is no account, no sign-up and nothing to install.
By the numbers
The idea
Every emoji is a character, not a picture. 😀 is codepoint U+1F600 — a single Unicode character that your device draws using whatever font it happens to have. Apple draws it one way, Google another, Samsung another again. The character you copy is identical in every case; only the picture differs.
That is a more useful way to think about emoji than treating them as images, and it is the idea the whole site is built around. It is why every emoji page shows its codepoint, why we compare how one character renders across six vendors, and why copying works everywhere — you are copying text, so it behaves like text.
The word itself comes from Japanese: 絵 (e, picture) plus 文字 (moji, character). Shigetaka Kurita drew the first 176 on a 12 × 12 pixel grid for NTT DoCoMo pagers in 1999. The resemblance to “emotion” is a coincidence.
What the site does
Emoji reference
Every emoji with its Unicode name, codepoint, meaning and how it renders on Apple, Google, Samsung, WhatsApp, Twitter and Discord.
Browse emoji →Emoji for…
Curated sets for a moment rather than a category — thinking of you, good luck, sus. Each glyph comes with a reason it belongs.
Browse sets →Unicode symbols
76,000 characters beyond emoji: arrows, mathematical operators, currency, box drawing, and the rest of the standard.
Browse symbols →Kaomoji and combos
Japanese text faces built from punctuation, and multi-emoji strings people actually send.
Browse kaomoji →How it is built
The site is a Next.js application. Emoji and symbol data comes from the Unicode Consortium's published character database, parsed at build time rather than fetched from anyone's API, so pages are static and fast and nothing breaks when a third party goes down.
Platform renderings are the vendors' own emoji fonts. Copying uses the browser clipboard API — the character never leaves your device. The one exception is the AI text generator, which sends what you type to Google's Gemini API and is the only feature that transmits anything you enter. That is set out plainly in the privacy policy.
How it is funded
GetMoji is free and intended to stay that way. It is funded by advertising and by the occasional link to other apps we make. There is no paid tier, no email capture and no data sold to anyone — see the privacy policy for exactly which third parties receive what.
It is built and maintained by ShickShack, a small independent studio. If something is wrong, missing or broken, the fastest way to change it is to tell us — that is genuinely how most of this site got fixed.