Random emoji

What it's for

A random emoji comes in handy more often than you'd think: it's the quickest way to start a game («guess the film from three emoji»), to pick a symbol for a list or a folder, to give a prompt to someone who has to write something and doesn't know where to start, or simply to decide without thinking when the choice doesn't matter. In a classroom it works well as the starting point for a made-up story.

The same emoji doesn't look the same on every phone

This is the thing almost nobody knows and it explains a good many misunderstandings. The Unicode system settles which emoji it is, not how it's drawn: the drawing is done by each operating system on its own. The same little face can be cheerful on one phone and ambiguous on another, and there are famous cases of emoji redrawn because they were being read the opposite way from how they were meant. When the emoji is the message, rather than decoration, it's worth picking ones that read the same everywhere.

How many there really are

The emoji defined by the standard now run to several thousand, counting all the skin-tone variants, the flags and the combinations (a family, for instance, is made of several symbols joined together). The ones actually used, though, are a few dozen: here you get a selection of the common ones, which are also the only ones you can count on everybody understanding.

Nearby tools

To strip every emoji out of a text, for instance before pasting it into software that can't digest them, there is Remove emoji. For decorated letters and bio symbols there is Text with special characters, and to count the characters of a post knowing an emoji often counts as two Social character counter. If instead you have to choose between options of your own, the page is Pick for me.