Surprising Official Emoji Names, and Why There Are Two

Unicode's permanent name for 😤 is FACE WITH LOOK OF TRIUMPH. Your phone calls it "face with steam from nose." Both are official. Emoji carry two separate names: a fixed Unicode character name that can never change, and a CLDR short name that can be rewritten as usage drifts. When they disagree, the emoji's official name is often surprising, and the gap usually tells you something about where the emoji came from.

We counted how often this happens. Using Unicode's own data files, 447 of the 1,400 emoji that are a single code point have a character name that doesn't match their current short name, even ignoring capitals and punctuation. Most of those are small trims, like LION FACE becoming plain "lion". A few dozen describe a different thing entirely, and those are the ones below.

Two naming systems, and only one of them is allowed to change

The first system is the Unicode character name. It's the uppercase label in the Unicode Character Database, and the stability policy is blunt about it: "The Unicode Name property value for any non-reserved code point will not be changed." Software uses these names as identifiers, so a rename would break things.

That rule holds even for mistakes. The non-emoji character U+FE18 was published as PRESENTATION FORM FOR VERTICAL RIGHT WHITE LENTICULAR BRAKCET, typo included. Unicode couldn't fix it. It added a formal alias with the right spelling and left the original exactly as it was.

The second system is the CLDR short name, maintained by Unicode's Common Locale Data Repository. CLDR's own guidance describes character names as "immutable, unique IDs" that exist only in English, while short names are translated into dozens of languages and can be improved in later versions. These are the names you see in emoji pickers and keyboard search.

So 😤 shows both systems at once. Its character name is frozen at FACE WITH LOOK OF TRIUMPH. Its short name was "face with steam from nose" even in the earliest emoji-test file we checked, from November 2016. Meanwhile 😵 shows the flexible side: same code point, three different short names in five years. More on that further down.

There's a third layer too, the colon codes in Slack and GitHub, which belong to neither system. Our guide to emoji shortcodes on Slack, Discord and GitHub explains why 😤 is :triumph: on most of them.

Names that point to a different emotion

The face emoji are where the two names drift furthest apart, because a face is open to interpretation in a way a train or a lemon isn't.

• 😤 FACE WITH LOOK OF TRIUMPH, now face with steam from nose. The character name describes victory. The short name describes the drawing, which most people read as anger. Both readings survive in everyday use.
• 😓 FACE WITH COLD SWEAT, now "downcast face with sweat". The rename shifted the focus from the sweat to the mood.
• 😅 SMILING FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH AND COLD SWEAT, now "grinning face with sweat". Same sweat drop, opposite feeling.
• 😡 POUTING FACE, now "enraged face". Pouting undersold it. The short name changed in the 2022 data, though the character name never will.
• 🤭 SMILING FACE WITH SMILING EYES AND HAND COVERING MOUTH, now "face with hand over mouth". The long name describes a giggle. The short name lets it be a gasp too.

That last pair shows what a short name is for. The character name commits to one reading, a giggle. The CLDR name describes only the gesture, which leaves room for the shocked gasp many people actually send it for.

Names written for Japanese phones

A large share of the oldest emoji came into Unicode from Japanese mobile carrier sets, and their character names were written with that context in mind. Outside Japan, the pictures took on new jobs, but the names stayed put.

• 💁 INFORMATION DESK PERSON, now person tipping hand. The pose was meant to be a receptionist gesturing toward something. The rest of the world read the raised palm as a hair flip and turned it into the sassy emoji.
• 🙆 FACE WITH OK GESTURE, now person gesturing OK. Arms over the head form a circle, an "OK" made with the whole body. Its partner 🙅 is FACE WITH NO GOOD GESTURE, arms crossed into an X.
• 🙇 PERSON BOWING DEEPLY, now "person bowing". The word "deeply" was dropped, but the depth of the bow is the point: it's an apology or a serious thank you, not a nod. The bowing kaomoji carry the same gesture in text form.
• 🏮 IZAKAYA LANTERN, now red paper lantern. The original name tied it to the red lanterns hung outside izakaya, casual Japanese pubs.
• 🗿 MOYAI, now moai. Emojipedia notes the Japanese spelling and early designs suggest the Moyai statue near Shibuya Station in Tokyo.
• 📛 NAME BADGE. The name is plain, but the flame or tulip shape puzzles people. It's a style of name tag commonly used at Japanese kindergartens.
• 🈂️ SQUARED KATAKANA SA, now "Japanese 'service charge' button". サ is short for sābisu-ryō, a service charge.
• 🈷️ SQUARED CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-6708, now "Japanese 'monthly amount' button". The character name simply gives the code point of 月, the character for month.
• 🎌 CROSSED FLAGS. Not any flags: on most platforms it's two Japanese flags crossed at the base so it reads as Japan rather than as a racing flag.

If a glyph in your keyboard has you stumped, our what emoji is this tool identifies it and shows its current name.

"Person" in the name, nobody in the picture

Several character names describe a whole person when the emoji only shows a pair of hands. It's a leftover from earlier artwork and from the Japanese gestures behind them.

• 🙌 PERSON RAISING BOTH HANDS IN CELEBRATION, now "raising hands". Picture the banzai cheer and the name makes sense. Modern art shows only the hands.
• 🙏 PERSON WITH FOLDED HANDS, now "folded hands". The famous "is it a high five?" debate exists partly because no person is drawn to settle it.
• 👯 WOMAN WITH BUNNY EARS, now "people with bunny ears". The character name has one woman; every modern design shows two people. CLDR dropped "partying" from its short name in 2017 as well.

Then there's the reverse case. 🛀 has the character name BATH, with no person at all, yet CLDR calls it "person taking bath" because that's what every design actually shows.

Black hearts and white stars

This one confuses almost everyone who looks it up. The red heart ❤️ has the character name HEAVY BLACK HEART. The yellow star ⭐ is WHITE MEDIUM STAR. And ☺️ is WHITE SMILING FACE.

None of these describe colour. In older character naming, "black" meant a filled shape and "white" meant an outline. ❤ began as a typesetting dingbat, a solid heart printed in black ink, long before phones drew it red. The short names simply describe what you see: "red heart", "star", "smiling face".

The same logic gives ✅ the character name WHITE HEAVY CHECK MARK, even though the emoji is a green box. Our red heart emoji page shows how far the artwork has travelled from that original black dingbat.

Names that hide a manga drawing convention

Some emoji make more sense once you know they came from comic art, where emotions are drawn as symbols around the face.

• 😪 sleepy face. Same name in both systems, but the blue bubble isn't a tear. Emojipedia describes it as a snot bubble, the anime and manga shorthand for someone dozing.
• 💦 SPLASHING SWEAT SYMBOL, now "sweat droplets". Unicode's name is clear about what the drops are, whatever else people use them for.
• 💨 DASH SYMBOL, now "dashing away". The puff is a speed cloud, the dust a cartoon character leaves when running off.
• 💢 ANGER SYMBOL, the same in both systems. It's the cross-shaped vein that pops up on an angry character's forehead in manga.

For the backstory on how these carrier sets became the first emoji most of the world saw, our complete history of emojis walks through the Japanese origins.

Renames you can date, from Unicode's own files

Every emoji release ships a file called emoji-test.txt that lists each emoji with its CLDR short name. We compared those files from November 2016 to April 2026. Of the 1,083 single code point emoji already present in 2016, 76 have had their short name changed since. These are the most interesting ones, dated by the file where the new name first appears.

1. June 2017 (Emoji 5.0 data): 😓 face with cold sweat became downcast face with sweat. 😛 face with stuck-out tongue became face with tongue. 😁 grinning face with smiling eyes became beaming face with smiling eyes.
2. February 2018 (Emoji 11.0 data): 🤪 crazy face became zany face. ⭐ white medium star became just star.
3. January 2019 (Emoji 12.0 data): 🥰 smiling face with 3 hearts became smiling face with hearts. 🤖 robot face became robot, and the animal heads lost "face": 🦊 fox, 🦁 lion, 🐸 frog. ✅ white heavy check mark became check mark button.
4. September 2020 (Emoji 13.1 data): 🔫 pistol became water pistol. 😵 dizzy face became knocked-out face. 🎯 direct hit became bullseye. ❓ question mark became red question mark.
5. August 2021 (Emoji 14.0 data): 😵 changed again, to face with crossed-out eyes. 🤗 hugging face became smiling face with open hands.
6. August 2022 (Emoji 15.0 data): 😡 pouting face became enraged face.

The 😵 story is the clearest case of a name being pushed aside. Emoji 13.1 also added 😵‍💫 face with spiral eyes, which arguably took over the dizzy meaning, and the old face spent a year as "knocked-out" before settling on a name that just describes its eyes. Our own detail page still lives at the dizzy face emoji page, the name most people search for.

These file dates mark when Unicode published the data, not when your phone changed. A phone can take months to catch up, which is also why a brand-new emoji can show up as an empty box until the update lands.

The water pistol: the art changed years before the name

🔫 is the one case where you can watch the two naming systems and the artwork move at three different speeds.

Apple swapped its revolver for a green water gun in iOS 10 in 2016. Samsung and Twitter followed in early 2018, and Google, Microsoft and Facebook announced the same switch in April 2018. CLDR's short name only became "water pistol" in the September 2020 data. The character name is still PISTOL and always will be, which is why our page sits at the pistol emoji address while describing a toy.

It's also why the emoji is a known trap across platforms. A message that looks playful on one phone could have looked very different on an older Android device a few years ago, a problem our post on emoji that look alike but aren't touches on from another angle.

Hugging face or jazz hands?

🤗 entered Unicode in 2015 as HUGGING FACE, and that character name is permanent. The short name changed to "smiling face with open hands" in the Emoji 14.0 data in 2021.

The reason is visible in the art. Most designs show two open palms beside the face rather than arms wrapping around anything, and Emojipedia notes it's often used to represent jazz hands, excitement or a little flourish of pride. The new short name stops promising a hug the drawing doesn't deliver. Plenty of people still use it as a hug, and our hugging face emoji page keeps the name people actually type.

This is how CLDR renames tend to work. They don't overrule usage. They make the official description accurate enough that both readings stay possible.

How to see both names for any emoji yourself

You don't need special software. Here's the method we used for this post.

1. Find the code point. Our emoji detail pages list it, and any Unicode lookup site will too.
2. For the character name, run python3 -c "import unicodedata; print(unicodedata.name('😤'))". It prints FACE WITH LOOK OF TRIUMPH. This only works for single code point emoji; sequences like 😵‍💫 have no character name of their own.
3. For the current short name, search unicode.org's emoji-test.txt for the code point. The text after the version number is the CLDR name.
4. To see a rename history, open older copies of the same file (they live in dated folders on unicode.org) and compare.

If you're curious which other well-known emoji have a second life beyond their official description, our list of hidden emoji meanings covers the slang side of the same question.