Smileys & Emotion Emoji — Faces, Hearts and Feelings

Smileys & Emotion is the heart of emoji. It groups the yellow faces, the hearts, and the small set of expressive symbols people use every day to give a message its tone. On EmojiSelect this category holds 171 emoji, organized into the same subcategories the Unicode Consortium defines: smiling faces, affectionate faces, tongue-out faces, hand-to-face gestures, skeptical faces, sleepy and unwell faces, faces with hats and glasses, concerned and negative faces, costumes, cat and monkey faces, hearts, and a handful of other emotion marks.

The category has the longest history in emoji. The first pictographic sets from Japanese mobile carriers in the late 1990s were almost entirely faces and hearts, and when Unicode 6.0 standardized emoji in 2010, the smileys formed its core. That heritage is why this family contains both the oldest emoji still in use and some of the newest additions in each Unicode release.

Our browse page orders these 171 entries by what people actually copy, and each subcategory — smiling, affection, tongue, hand, skeptical, sleepy, unwell, hat, glasses, concerned, negative, costume, cat, monkey, heart and emotion — links straight to its members. Open any face and one page gives you the meaning, conversational notes, usage examples, related emoji and copy formats.

Why it matters

These emoji do the work of tone. A message that might read cold — a correction, a refusal, a piece of bad news — softens with a single face. A compliment gains warmth with a heart. Because the meaning of a face can shift with platform and age group, we document conversational usage, common misunderstandings and safer alternatives on each emoji's own page. The category keeps growing with every Unicode release: Emoji 9.0 brought 🤣 and 🤠, Emoji 11.0 added 🥰 and 🤩, Emoji 13.1 introduced ❤️🔥, and Emoji 14.0 gave us 🥹 and 🫶 — so the oldest emoji family is also among the freshest.