Emojipedia is an emoji reference website which documents the meaning and common usage of emoji characters in the Unicode Standard. Emojipedia also publishes articles and provides tools for tracking new emoji characters, design changes and usage trends. Emojipedia is a voting member of The Unicode Consortium and has been called "the world's number one resource on emoji".
History
created Emojipedia in 2013, and told the Hackney Gazette "the idea came about when Apple added emojis to iOS 6, but failed to mention which ones were new". Emojipedia rose to prominence with the release of Unicode 7 in 2014, when The Register reported the "online encyclopedia of emojis has been chucked offline after vast numbers of people visited the site" in relation to the downtime experienced by the site at the time. In 2015, Emojipedia entered its first partnership with Quartz to release an app that allowed users access previously-hidden country flag emojis on iOS. Emojipedia told Business Insider in early-2016 that it served "over 140 million page views" per year, and was profitable. In mid-2016, Emojipedia "urged Apple to rethink its plan to convert the handgun emoji symbol into a water pistol icon" citing cross-platform confusion. In 2017 The Library of Congress launched the Web Cultures Web Archive which featured a history of memes, gifs, and emojis from references including Emojipedia, Boing Boing and GIPHY. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the site served 23 million page views in October 2017. Total page views for 2013–2019 were said to have reached one billion by February 2019.
is a holiday created by Emojipedia in 2014 which is held on 17 July each year. According to the New York Times, 17 July was chosen due to the design of the calendar emoji showing this date. Emojipedia used the second annual World Emoji Day to release EmojiVote as "an experiment in Emoji democracy". In 2017 and 2018, Apple used this event to preview new emojis for iOS and Emojipedia announced the winners of the World Emoji Awards live from the New York Stock Exchange.
Adopt an Emoji
Emojipedia launched Adopt an Emoji in September 2015 as "an attempt to make the site free of display ads" according to Wired. This preceded a similar program by the Unicode Consortium in December 2015. The Emojipedia "Adopt an Emoji" program was shut down in November 2016, citing confusion for users and advertisers due to the similarity with Unicode's fundraising effort.
Cultural impact
Emojipedia's images for future emoji designs have been used as the source of jokes in opening monologues on late night television shows such as The Daily Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. In 2018, Portland Maine's Press Herald reported that Senator Angus King had endorsed a new lobster emoji but Emojipedia's design was called out as "anatomically incorrect" due to an incorrect number of legs. The number of legs on Emojipedia's lobster design was subsequently fixed in a future release. Slate reported this as "a victory for scientists and lobster fans everywhere". Skater Tony Hawk criticized Emojipedia's skateboard design as being mid-'80s... beginner-level' board 'definitely not representative' of the modern sport" and subsequently worked with the company to produce an updated design. On BBC Radio 4, Stephen Fry described Emojipedia as "a kind of Académie française for your iPhone" when assessing its impact on the English language.
Legal precedent
In 2018, Emojipedia was presented in the Federal Court of Australia as "a reputable website in telling us how to interpret these faces" by a lawyer for Geoffrey Rush during a defamation case against Nationwide News. This was in the context of interpreting an emoji sent by Rush to a fellow actor, which Rush described as "the looniest emoji I could find". Rush said he would have used an emoji of Groucho Marx or the Muppets' Fozzie Bear if they had been available. Reports indicate Rush's lawyer "attempted to hand up to Justice Michael Wigney a printout of the emoji's meaning from Emojipedia" but a barrister for Nationwide News objected, stating it "doesn't matter what Emojipedia says the emoji is". Justice Wigney agreed that an emoji definition "is in the eye of the beholder": inferring the context within the message was more important than the Emojipedia definition.
