What Your Emoji Are Called in 8 Languages (and the Ones That Surprise)

Most emoji do not carry the same name from one language to the next. In Unicode's official CLDR names, 👍 is "thumbs up" in English but "قبول" (acceptance) in Arabic, 🙈 is "Gandhi's monkey" in Hindi, and 🩶 grey heart is "灰心" in Chinese, an everyday word for feeling discouraged. We compared 184 emoji across 8 languages: only 4 names anywhere are simply the English word reused.

Everything quoted below is copied straight from the CLDR 48.2 data file that powers our 8-language screen reader name table, with the glyph next to each name so you can check it yourself. Where we add an English gloss for a non-Latin name, it is our reading of a common word, not part of the data.

Where these names come from, and what we counted

Every emoji has a short name in Unicode's Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR). It is the name a screen reader can speak, and the words in it can feed emoji search. Each language gets its own, written by contributors in that language rather than machine translated from English.

Our copy is CLDR 48.2, released 17 March 2026, pulled on 20 October 2026. It covers English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Chinese, Hindi and Arabic. Two numbers matter for the rest of this post:

• Coverage: of the 1,923 distinct emoji in Unicode's own list, 1,914 have a name in each language. Hindi is one short at 1,913, because it has no name yet for 🪊 trombone from Emoji 17.0.
• Side by side: the full 8-language comparison covers 185 emoji, which is every emoji in the Smileys & Emotion group plus 16 heavy hitters such as 👍, 🙏, 🔥 and a few flags. One of those 185 (🫫, from Emoji 18.0) has no name in any language, so the comparisons below use the 184 that do.

That means the quirks below come mostly from faces and hearts. That is where the emotional vocabulary lives, so it is also where languages disagree the most.

Why a translator is allowed to pick a different picture

This is not sloppiness. CLDR's own instructions to the people who write these names say they "should not just be literal translations of the English" and that "the names should be based on associations to the image in your language". Brevity is part of the brief too: the guide wants short names that work "both written and spoken" (CLDR's "Emoji Names and Keywords" guide at cldr.unicode.org/translation/characters/short-names-and-keywords, checked 22 October 2026).

So when a Hindi contributor looks at 🙏 and writes "अभिवादन" (a greeting) instead of "folded hands", they are doing exactly what they were asked to do. The English name describes the drawing. Many other languages name what the gesture means where they live. That single design decision explains most of what follows.

Names that describe a different thing entirely

Some emoji get a name in another language that you would never guess from the English. These are the clearest cases in our data:

• 😤 is "face with steam from nose" in English. Japanese calls it "勝ち誇った顔" (a triumphant face), Chinese "傲慢" (arrogant) and Hindi "विजयी मुद्रा वाला चेहरा", a face in a victorious pose. Three languages read pride where English reads a snort.
• 🤓 is "nerd face" in English and "Strebergesicht" (swot face) in German. Arabic names it "وجه عبقري", genius face, while Hindi goes the other way with "मूर्खता के भाव वाला चेहरा", a face showing foolishness. Same glyph, opposite verdicts.
• 👍 is "thumbs up" almost everywhere, but Arabic names it "قبول", acceptance or approval. It names the answer, not the hand.
• 💨 is "dashing away" in English and "salir corriendo" in Spanish, both about running off. German sees "Staubwolke" (a dust cloud) and Chinese "尾气", exhaust fumes.
• 😷 is "face with medical mask" in English. Chinese simply calls it "感冒", a cold.
• 🤑 is "money-mouth face" in English, "Gesicht mit Dollarzeichen" (face with dollar signs) in German, and "发财" in Chinese, which is the wish to get rich.

If you have ever wondered why 😤 gets used for gloating in some group chats and for anger in others, the names are a decent clue. The picture invites both readings, and different languages wrote down different ones.

Monkeys, oni and tengu: when the picture is a cultural reference

Some emoji depict something that is already famous in one culture, and the local names say so out loud.

The three monkeys 🙈 🙉 🙊 are the best example. English describes the proverb: "see-no-evil monkey". Japanese uses the classic triple "見ざる", "聞かざる" and "言わざる" (not seeing, not hearing, not speaking). Chinese uses the four-character phrases "非礼勿视", "非礼勿听" and "非礼勿言", a classical way of saying do not look at, listen to or speak of what is improper. Hindi ties them to a person: "बुरा मत देखो, गांधी जी का बन्दर", see no evil, Gandhi's monkey. German just describes the pose, "sich die Augen zuhaltendes Affengesicht".

The two red masks are the other case. 👹 is plain "ogre" in English and French, but Spanish spells out "demonio japonés oni" and Japanese simply writes "鬼". 👺 is "goblin" in English and "Kobold" in German, yet Japanese names it "天狗", Spanish "demonio japonés tengu" and French "monstre japonais". Hindi labels both as Japanese creatures: "जापानी राक्षस" and "जापानी पिशाच".

English is the outlier here. It turned two specific figures from Japanese folklore into generic Western fantasy monsters, and four of the other seven languages put the Japanese origin back.

One word, two emoji: the 鬼 collision

We checked every language for one name used on two different emoji. Inside a single language there are none in the 184 we compared. Across languages there is exactly one, and it is a good one.

"鬼" is the Japanese name for 👹 ogre. It is also the Chinese name for 👻 ghost. The character is shared by both writing systems, but in Japanese it means a horned oni and in Chinese it means a ghost or spirit. Search "鬼" in a Japanese picker and in a Chinese one, and if the picker matches on these names, you would expect two different emoji to come up.

It is a small thing, but it shows why "just translate the name" does not work for emoji. The same character points at two different pictures depending on the reader's language.

Chinese names that are words people actually say

Chinese takes the "associations in your language" instruction further than any other language in the set. Of the 184 names, 87 are one or two characters long. Many are not descriptions at all but the word you would type in a chat.

• The grins are laughter sounds: 😀 "嘿嘿", 😃 "哈哈", 😁 "嘻嘻", and 🙂 "呵呵".
• The colour hearts are compressed to two characters: 💛 "黄心", 💚 "绿心", 💙 "蓝心". Two of them land on idioms. 🖤 is "黑心", which in everyday Chinese means black-hearted in the sense of wicked. 🩶 is "灰心", the ordinary word for losing heart.
• 😍 is "花痴", a teasing word for someone helplessly infatuated, and 😻 is "花痴的猫", the infatuated cat.
• 😑 is "无语", speechless in the "I have no words" sense, and 😐 is "冷漠", indifferent.

The word for face mostly disappears too. Among the 105 emoji whose English name contains "face", the Chinese name contains "脸" in only 17. Japanese keeps "顔" in 58. Spanish, Hindi and Arabic keep their word for face almost every time (105, 104 and 104), while French keeps "visage" in 101 and German "Gesicht" in 100.

For anyone typing in Chinese this is useful: you may find 😑 faster by typing the feeling than by describing the drawing. For a non-Chinese reader it is a window into how the emoji are actually used there, which is a different thing from how they look.

Length: from one character to sixty-four

Because the names are written to be spoken, length matters. These are the average name lengths in characters across the 184 emoji:

• Chinese: 3.1
• Japanese: 5.3
• Arabic: 13.2
• English: 15.9
• Hindi: 18.6
• Spanish: 19.5
• French: 20.2
• German: 21.1

The longest name in the whole comparison is German, for 😝: "Gesicht mit herausgestreckter Zunge und zusammengekniffenen Augen", 64 characters. English says "squinting face with tongue". The shortest are single Chinese characters such as 😪 "困" (sleepy) and 😢 "哭" (cry), and Japanese 🔥 "火".

French has the most charming shortcut. 😋 "face savoring food" in English is just "miam" in French, the sound you make over something tasty. German does the opposite with 💬, which English calls "speech balloon" and German "Sprechblase mit drei Punkten" and spells out the three dots inside the bubble.

Length is not a quality score. Character counts flatter Chinese and Japanese because each character carries more. What it does tell you is how long a screen reader will talk, which our post on how screen readers read emoji in bios measures in English.

How often another language just borrows the English word

Hardly ever. We compared each name with the English one, ignoring case, across the 184 emoji:

• Spanish matches English once: 🤖 "robot".
• French matches three times: 🤖 "robot", 👽 "alien" and 👹 "ogre".
• German, Japanese, Chinese, Hindi and Arabic match zero times.

Even Hindi and Arabic, which could have kept "robot", make it 🤖 "रोबोट चेहरा" and "وجه روبوت", a robot face. Loanwords do appear in other scripts, such as Japanese 👍 "サムズアップ" and 🤗 "ハグ", or Hindi 👍 "थंब्स अप", but those are spelled in the local script, so a search typed in Latin letters will not match them.

The practical point: if you set your phone to another language, almost none of the emoji names you know in English will work in its search box.

Small oddities that only show up side by side

Some differences are not cultural at all. They are just choices that look strange next to each other.

• Hindi grades the frowns by anger. 🙁 "slightly frowning face" is "कम क्रोधित चेहरा", a less angry face, and ☹️ is "अधिक क्रोधित चेहरा", a more angry face. English describes a mouth. Hindi describes a temperature.
• Skin tones get local vocabulary. The medium tone on 👍🏽 is "tono de piel medio" in Spanish, but French says "peau légèrement mate" (slightly olive skin) and Hindi "गेहुँआ त्वचा", wheat-coloured skin, a common way of describing complexion in India.
• A probable typo in Arabic. Of the 105 emoji English calls a face, every Arabic name starts with "وجه" (face) except one: 🥸 disguised face, which reads "وجع مقنّع". The first word differs by one letter and "وجع" means pain or ache. We are reporting what the file says; it looks like a slip that a future CLDR release may fix.
• Japanese names a score, not a number. 💯 is "hundred points" in English, "100 Punkte" in German and "100点満点" in Japanese, which is specifically a perfect score of 100 out of 100.
• The newest faces get sound effects. 🫯 fight cloud, added in Emoji 17.0, is "Kampfwolke" in German but "ボカスカ" in Japanese, an onomatopoeia for a flurry of blows. 🎉 is "クラッカー", the Japanese word for a party popper.
• German adds a second face. 🫨 shaking face is "zitterndes Doppelgesicht", a trembling double face, as if the shake had split it in two.

None of these change what the emoji is. They do change what a listener hears and what a searcher has to type.

The nine emoji no language can name yet

CLDR 48.2 was finished before Emoji 18.0 was released in September 2026, so all nine new characters from that release have no name in any of our eight languages. The names below are Unicode's character names, not CLDR names:

• 🫫 cracking face
• 🫹 leftwards thumb sign and 🫺 rightwards thumb sign
• 🫌 monarch butterfly
• 🫝 pickle
• 🛙 lighthouse
• 🪋 meteor
• 🪌 eraser
• 🪍 net with handle

Until a later CLDR release adds them, anything that relies on these names alone has nothing to say or search for when it meets one. Most phones cannot draw them yet either, so for now the gap is mostly theoretical. When a later CLDR release fills the gap, every language in this post will get its own name, chosen its own way.

Using the local name to find an emoji faster

CLDR publishes two things per emoji: the short name quoted above, and a set of keywords. Its guidance describes keywords as words "that can be used to search for the character in your language". Our file stores only the short names, so we cannot tell you every word that will find a given emoji. The names are still the best starting point, because they are the words a native speaker chose.

A few tactics that follow from the data:

1. Search the meaning, not the drawing, in Chinese and Japanese. Typing "无语" or "微笑" is closer to how those names were written than describing eyes and mouths.
2. Do not search in English on a phone set to another language. Only four of 1,288 non-English names in our comparison are the same word as English.
3. Use the culture-specific word when there is one. In Japanese, "天狗" and "鬼" are the names CLDR gives 👺 and 👹. In Hindi, "गांधी" is part of all three monkey names.
4. Check the exact local name before you rely on it. Picker implementations vary and we have not tested each keyboard, so look up the emoji in our CLDR name table and try the name you find there.

The same names show up when an emoji is read aloud. NVDA on Windows documents that it uses this data; Apple and Google publish no source for VoiceOver and TalkBack, so their wording can differ. If your audience listens in another language, the name they hear for 👍 may be "قبول", not "thumbs up".

What the names reveal about meaning

The interesting thing about these lists is that they are a record of what each emoji means to the people naming it. A face English calls "steam from nose" is a victory pose in three other languages. A heart English calls grey is, in Chinese, a word for giving up.

That matters when you send emoji across languages. Our guide to hidden emoji meanings covers the slang layer, and Gen Z and millennial readings shows the generational one. The CLDR names add a third: the meaning a language wrote down on purpose. For the standard English meanings of each glyph, start with the emoji meanings hub or the complete emoji meanings guide, and if terms like CLDR, short name or ZWJ sequence are new to you, the emoji glossary explains each with a real example.