Emoji Copy and Paste

An emoji is a character, not a picture

This matters the moment something goes wrong. An emoji is a Unicode character, the same kind of thing as the letter A, so it travels anywhere text travels: a caption, a file name, a spreadsheet cell, a line of JSON. Clicking one on this page puts that character on your clipboard. There is no image to download, and right-clicking to save the picture gets you nothing useful, because the picture was painted by a font a moment before you saw it.

Every platform ships its own emoji font, so the same character is drawn differently by Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft and X. The meaning is shared; the artwork is not. The real failure case is age: when a device has never been told what a character looks like, it draws an empty box instead. That is the whole story behind the box, and it is why the section below separates the emoji your phone can already show from the ones it cannot.

Which part of this page to use

• Popular: the two dozen emoji that carry most everyday messages. Start here if you just need a reaction.
• Latest: only the newest release, so you can find the new ones without hunting through nine categories.
• The category list (Smileys, People, Animals, Food, Travel, Activities, Objects, Symbols, Flags): the full Unicode set, over 1,900 emoji, in the order Unicode groups them.
• Search: type an English word such as heart, cat, fire or pizza. It matches the official Unicode short name of each emoji, so plain nouns work better than descriptions.
• Recently used: appears once you have copied something and is kept in your browser only, so it survives a reload but never leaves your device.

What the new iPhone emoji are

The newest batch phones can actually draw is Emoji 17.0, which Unicode finalized in September 2025 and Apple shipped in iOS 26.4 (spring 2026). Android makers added it over the following months. There are 8, and the Latest category above copies any of them in one click:

• 🫪distorted face
• 🫯fight cloud
• 🫈hairy creature
• 🧑‍🩰ballet dancer
• 🫍orca
• 🛘landslide
• 🪊trombone
• 🪎treasure chest

The next release, Emoji 18.0, was finalized on September 16, 2026 with 9 new emoji: cracked face, leftwards thumb, rightwards thumb, monarch butterfly, pickle, lighthouse, shooting star, eraser, hand net. No phone can display them yet. Apple and Google normally add a new release in the spring that follows, so expect them during 2027, and expect your keyboard to label some of them slightly differently once the final names land. Until then they would be empty boxes on every device, which is why this page lists the names but does not hand you the characters.

How to copy and paste an emoji

• iPhone and iPad: tap the emoji here, then press and hold inside the field you are writing in and tap Paste. If you would rather use the keyboard, tap the globe or smiley key on the bottom row.
• Android: tap the emoji, then press and hold in the field and choose Paste. Gboard and most other keyboards also have a smiley key next to the space bar.
• Windows: click the emoji, then Ctrl+V. The built-in emoji panel opens with the Windows key and the period key.
• Mac: click the emoji, then Cmd+V. The system picker opens with Control, Command and Space together.

If a field refuses the paste, type any letter first, paste after it, then delete the letter. Some editors only enable the paste option once the field is genuinely focused.

How to put an emoji in a profile name or bio

1. Copy the emoji you want from the grid above.
2. Open the profile editor of the app: Edit profile on Instagram, Edit profile on X, or User Profile in Discord settings.
3. Paste into the display name or the bio field, not into the username field. Usernames allow only letters, numbers and a couple of punctuation marks.
4. Save, then check how it looks on a different device if you can. Some apps shorten a long display name and will cut an emoji off the end.

Where emoji work and where they fail

• Instagram: the profile name, the bio, captions and comments all take emoji. The @username allows only letters, numbers, periods and underscores, so no emoji there.
• TikTok and X: display names, bios and posts accept emoji; the @handle follows the same letters and numbers rule.
• Discord: display names, server nicknames and messages accept emoji. The account username is lowercase letters, digits, periods and underscores only. Custom server emoji are uploaded images rather than Unicode characters, so they behave nothing like the ones on this page.
• WhatsApp, Messenger, Slack, Telegram, Notion: all handle Unicode emoji normally. Slack and Notion may swap in their own artwork, which is a display choice, not a change to the character.
• Games: name rules vary a lot, and many games reject anything outside a small allowed set of letters and digits. Assume a name field will refuse emoji until you have tested it on an account you do not mind risking.
• File names, code, spreadsheet formulas: possible on modern systems, but a bad idea. Backups, build scripts and older tools mangle them, and the failure is silent.

Things to watch out for

Four things bite people. Age: an emoji added in the last year or two will be an empty box for anyone on an older phone, so keep important messages to emoji that have been around a while. Length: most emoji count as two characters rather than one, because of how text is stored, and a joined emoji such as a family costs several more, which is how a short post suddenly exceeds a limit. Tone: the same emoji reads as friendly in one group and sarcastic in another, and platforms sometimes redraw one so that its tone shifts between versions. Accessibility: a screen reader reads the full name of every emoji aloud, so a decorative row of ten becomes ten spoken phrases. Use one, not ten, where that matters.