Emoji copy and paste: free Unicode emojis with search and skin tones

Free emojis to copy and paste: what the tool includes

The tool brings together 1,898 emojis from the Unicode standard, up to Unicode Emoji 15.1, sorted into the same categories Unicode uses: smileys and emotion, people and body, animals and nature, food and drink, travel and places, activities, objects, symbols and flags. In front of them there is a group of 43 symbols for titles, descriptions and lists, such as ✔, ➤, ★, the 【 】 brackets and the circled numbers ① ② ③.

When you click an emoji, it is copied to the clipboard and a notice pops up. It is also added to Your selection, a tray that collects everything you pick: you can build a combo (a flag, a plane and a sun, for example) and copy it in one go. The detail panel shows the emoji name and its codes in Unicode, HTML, CSS and JavaScript, ready to use on a website.

Emoji search by name

The search box finds emojis by name and by related words: type “laugh”, “heart”, “fire”, “flag” or “money” and the grid filters instantly. It ignores capital letters, and if you combine it with the category buttons you narrow things down even more.

The colored circles in the toolbar change the skin tone. There are five tones plus the default yellow, and they apply to the hand, people and job emojis that support them. Whatever you copy already carries the tone you chose, so you do not have to hunt for each variant.

What is an emoji and why it looks different on every phone

An emoji is a text character, just like a letter, that your device draws as a small color picture. Unicode's technical standard defines emoji as “pictographs (pictorial symbols) that are typically presented in a colorful cartoon form and used inline in text”. The word comes from Japanese: e (picture) and moji (character), so its resemblance to “emotion” is a coincidence.

Being text has practical consequences. What you copy is not an image but a code that the Unicode Consortium assigns to each emoji: the grinning face, for example, is U+1F600. Every company draws that code in its own style, so the same emoji looks different on an iPhone, an Android phone, Windows or WhatsApp, even though it means the same thing. That is why it is better not to choose an emoji for a tiny detail of the drawing, which may change on the screen of the person who receives it.

Emoji vs emoticon

Strictly speaking, an emoticon is a face made with keyboard characters, such as 🙂 or ;-), and an emoji is a picture with its own code. In everyday use the two words often mean the same thing, and on this page we use them the way people do when they search. If you are after text faces and typographic signs rather than color pictures, those are characters too, and you can copy them the same way.

How many emojis are there and how new ones get approved

The official Unicode emoji count for version 18.0 is 3,972 emojis. The number is that high because it counts every skin tone, every combination of people and every flag separately: flags alone add up to 270. When each emoji appears once and the tone is chosen separately, as in this tool, the list shrinks to less than half and is far easier to browse.

Unicode organizes emojis into groups and subgroups (smiling faces, hands, mammals, fruit, ground transportation...) and the grid above follows that same structure. Each emoji also has an official English name, which is what you see in the detail panel when you copy it.

New emojis: from proposal to keyboard

Unicode opens a window each year to submit emoji proposals (in 2026 it ran from April 2 to July 31), reviews them and can only add a limited number. In recent years it has released one Unicode Emoji version per year, and version 18.0 came out on September 16, 2026. After that, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung have to design the new emojis and add them to their systems, so it takes a while for them to reach keyboards. If someone sends you an emoji your phone does not have yet, you will see a box, a question mark or the separate emojis that make it up.

Emoji keyboard on computers and phones

Every current operating system has a built-in emoji keyboard. It is worth knowing, because for a single emoji it is the fastest option. This page is more convenient when you want to see many at once, combine several or grab their codes for a website.

Emojis on Windows

On Windows, the shortcut is the Windows key + period while you type in any text field. A panel opens that filters emojis as you type and also includes kaomoji, a symbols tab with punctuation marks and accented letters and, on Windows 11, GIFs, as explained in Microsoft's Windows keyboard tips.

Emojis on Mac

On a Mac, Control + Command + Space opens the emoji and symbols viewer, and Fn + E does the same. You can also find it in the Edit menu, under Emoji & Symbols. In your keyboard settings you can make the Fn or globe key show emojis with a single press, which is handy if you use them often.

Emojis on iPhone and Android

On iPhone and iPad, tap the text field and then the emoji or globe button; there is a search bar at the top, and if you touch and hold a people emoji you can pick a skin tone. On Android with Gboard, Google's keyboard, tap where you type and then the emoji button. Other Android keyboards place it on a different key, but they work in a similar way.

Unicode emoji under the hood: skin tones, combinations and flags

Many emojis are not a single character but a short sequence that the system joins when it displays it. Knowing this helps you understand why an emoji sometimes “breaks” when you paste it into an older app.

• Skin tones. Unicode defines five modifiers, from U+1F3FB to U+1F3FF, based on the Fitzpatrick scale used in dermatology. They go right after the emoji: the waving hand followed by the medium skin tone modifier becomes a waving hand in that tone.
• Combinations. Families, couples and many jobs are built by joining emojis with an invisible character, U+200D (zero width joiner). If the system does not know the combination, it shows the separate emojis.
• Color or text style. Some older characters, such as the heart ❤ or the check mark ✔, can appear in color or in black and white. The U+FE0F selector asks for the color version and U+FE0E for the text version.

Emoji flags: how the US, UK and Andorra flags work

Country flags are written with two special letters, the regional indicators, which match the country code: U and S make the US flag, G and B the UK flag (its official code is GB, not UK) and A and D the flag of Andorra. That is why systems with no flag artwork show the two letters instead. England, Scotland and Wales use a different mechanism, tag sequences, and they are the three subdivisions that Unicode recommends showing as flags.

Emojis in HTML and on your website: codes and 4-byte characters

On a web page you can type the emoji as is, as long as the page uses UTF-8 (set with the <meta charset="utf-8"> tag), or use its numeric reference, which always works: 😀 displays the grinning face. The tool's detail panel gives you that reference every time you copy an emoji.

One detail causes a lot of trouble on websites and content management systems: most emojis sit above code point U+FFFF and take up 4 bytes in UTF-8. Databases set up with a 3-byte character set cannot store them and turn them into question marks, “????”. The fix is to use a 4-byte encoding (in MySQL, utf8mb4) or to store emojis as HTML references. If your site shows question marks where emojis used to be, that is usually the reason.

Emoji codes to copy

Each emoji is written differently depending on where you use it. The Unicode code point (U+1F600) is its identifier; in HTML it is 😀; in a stylesheet, inside content, it is \1F600; and in JavaScript, \u{1F600}. Sequences, such as flags or emojis with a skin tone, chain several codes together. Getting these details right so nothing breaks in any browser is part of the web design work we do at DigiAcción.

Emojis and symbols in titles and descriptions: what Google says about SEO

Many people look for emojis to make their Google results stand out and raise their CTR, the share of people who click. Before you do, there are two things Google explains in its official documentation: search result titles are generated automatically from the title element, headings such as the H1, the og:title tag and link text; and description snippets come mainly from the page content, although Google sometimes uses the meta description. In other words, there is no guarantee that your title and description will show exactly as written, with or without emojis.

On emojis specifically, Google's John Mueller said in a Google Search Central office hours session in January 2022 that you can use them in titles and descriptions, that Google does not show all of them in search results and that they neither give a ranking advantage nor hurt rankings. Any effect is on clicks, not on position, and the only way to know is to measure it: note the page CTR in Search Console, change the title and compare a few weeks later.

Emojis for YouTube titles and social media

On YouTube and social media, emojis are displayed in each platform's own style. They work best when they add information (a ✔ before the benefits, a flag for the language, a ★ in a rating) rather than just decoration. Use them sparingly, one or two per title and never in place of keywords, and keep in mind that screen readers read each emoji's name aloud. If what you want is to show up in search engines and AI chats, at DigiAcción we handle SEO and GEO for business websites.

Digital marketing agency in Andorra: who made this tool

This tool is free and was made by DigiAcción, a digital marketing agency in Andorra based in La Massana. It runs in your browser, with no sign-up and nothing to install, on computers, tablets and phones, and it does not store what you copy.

At DigiAcción we do web design and online stores, SEO, GEO (AI search optimization), Google Ads and Meta Ads campaigns, video and graphic design, and we work with companies in Andorra, Spain and other countries. Emojis, symbols and colors are details that show up in every website, every title and every campaign, which is why we turned them into tools anyone can use.

If you need something more specific, we have other free tools: one with star emojis and star symbols and a star rating generator, and another with quotation marks and writing symbols, apostrophes, primes and other typographic signs with their codes.