Provenance
Data sources & licences
Every field on DBEmoji comes from one of the sources below. Facts are copied from the Unicode Consortium and never rewritten; everything interpretive is ours and is labelled as such.
Emoji list, codepoints, CLDR short names, Unicode groups and subgroups, Emoji versions
- Source
- Unicode Consortium — emoji-test.txt
- Licence
- Unicode License v3
- How it is used
- Vendored into the repository and re-derived on every build. Copied verbatim; never edited.
Official Unicode character names
- Source
- Unicode Character Database — UnicodeData.txt
- Licence
- Unicode License v3
- How it is used
- Filtered to the codepoints this dataset references, then vendored.
GitHub shortcodes (:joy:, :fire:) and GitHub's search words
- Source
- GitHub gemoji @ fadaeaf
- Licence
- MIT
- How it is used
- Pinned to one revision and vendored. Only the codes gemoji maps to an emoji are shown as its shortcode, and they are labelled as GitHub's. Slack, Discord and other apps keep their own lists, which we have not verified.
Keywords and keyword tags
- Source
- Unicode CLDR 48.2.3 — English annotations
- Licence
- Unicode License v3
- How it is used
- Pinned and vendored. Shown on each emoji page as keywords — never as shortcodes — and used for search and for keyword tags such as “cat” or “halloween”.
Static emoji artwork (colour, flat, high-contrast, 3D)
- Source
- Microsoft Fluent Emoji
- Licence
- MIT
- How it is used
- Served from our CDN. Shown as one possible rendering — it is not how your own device draws the emoji.
Animated emoji (Lottie)
- Source
- Google Noto Emoji Animation
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0
- How it is used
- Streamed directly from fonts.gstatic.com and credited to Google on every page that shows one. We do not mirror or re-host these files.
Colour classification per emoji
- Source
- DBEmoji — pixel analysis of Twemoji artwork
- Licence
- CC-BY 4.0 (artwork)
- How it is used
- Derived measurement, not artwork redistribution: each PNG is sampled in HSL space and bucketed into colour groups.
Meanings, mood and tone, common uses, misreadings, mood tags, collections
- Source
- DBEmoji editorial
- Licence
- Editorial interpretation
- How it is used
- Not part of the Unicode Standard. Labelled as DBEmoji editorial interpretation wherever it appears.
Emoji Kitchen stickers (/create-emoji)
- Source
- Google Emoji Kitchen (Gboard), via www.gstatic.com
- Licence
- Google's artwork — no open licence
- How it is used
- Each sticker is loaded straight from Google's servers when you view it; DBEmoji stores, edits and re-hosts none of them, and is not affiliated with Google. Only the list of which pairs exist is kept here.
Which Emoji Kitchen pairs exist
- Source
- emoji-kitchen-backend (metadata.json, pinned revision)
- Licence
- No licence stated by the project
- How it is used
- Reduced at build time to pair indexes and release dates (scripts/build-kitchen-index.mjs). The sticker URL for every pair is rebuilt from that data and checked against the source.
Sticker images (/sticker)
- Source
- emojis.com
- Licence
- Not independently verified
- How it is used
- Collected from emojis.com, where the images are generated by its users. DBEmoji has not yet confirmed, image by image, the right to store and redistribute them; that review is in progress. Unlike everything above, this collection is not covered by an open licence we can point to.
Citing or reusing this data
Unicode facts are Unicode’s — cite the Consortium directly for codepoints, names and versions. If you cite DBEmoji, cite it for what is ours: the collection taxonomy, the tag vocabulary, tone labels and meanings. Please say which dataset version you used.
DBEmoji, dataset 2026-10-21, based on Unicode Emoji 16.0. Retrieved 2026-10-21.
Corrections and removal requests
If a meaning, tag or attribution here is wrong, it is worth fixing. Attribution problems and requests from rights holders to remove an image are treated as blocking and are handled before anything else in the queue.