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.
Shortcodes (:joy:, :fire:) and search keywords
- Source
- GitHub gemoji
- Licence
- MIT
- How it is used
- Used for shortcode lookup and as one input to search. Keyword-derived tags are not treated as topical claims.
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
- Apache License 2.0
- How it is used
- Streamed directly from fonts.gstatic.com. 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, tone, common uses, misreadings, 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.
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 2026-09-18, based on Unicode Emoji 16.0. Retrieved 2026-09-18.
Corrections
If a meaning, tag or attribution here is wrong, it is worth fixing. Use the report-issues link in the sidebar. Attribution problems are treated as blocking and are corrected before anything else in the queue.