There is only one amphibian emoji


CURRENTLY a

I enjoy emoji.
But the categories puzzle me. Take the animal emojis, for example. Here's how the Unicode Consortium groups them:

Notice any inconsistencies? Why do some emojis get faces? Why are there five different chicken emojis? Is a dragon an animal? Is a spider web a bug? Why is there only one amphibian?

Let me propose some more sensible categories.

BY VERSION a

I'll start by versioning the emoji animals so you know which ones render properly on your device.

It's August 2024 at the time of writing.
My phone supports emojis through 2023.
My computer supports emojis through 2019.
Which emojis does your platform support?

Watch out for animals like the polar bear ðŸŧ‍❄ïļ. If your platform is outdated, you will see a bear ðŸŧ and a snowflake ❄ïļ next to each other instead of the new polar bear emoji. The service dog, black cat, black bird, and phoenix behave similarly.

You will also see a placeholder symbol ïŋŋ for emojis that aren't supported by your platform. To see what the latest emojis look like, check out emojipedia.org.

BY FACES OR NOT a

When one platform renders an animal face, another platform may render the whole animal body. I checked each emoji:

I only checked the renderings for Google, Apple, and Windows emojis. Other platforms like Twitter, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Samsung may have slightly different results. If you want to compare emoji renderings across all 20+ platforms, check out emojipedia. Example: baby chick emoji designs.

Here's a quirk: of the 23 animal face emojis, only 10 are officially named "face". Maybe we can petition for face-naming updates during Unicode's next naming cycle? At least they annotated animal face emojis with extra keywords.

This list excludes the nine cat faces and three monkey faces in the Smileys & Emotion category. I'll also be excluding faceless animal emojis from now on. Emojis like paw prints and coral don't fit the aesthetic.

DUPLICATES a

Some animals have multiple emoji representations:

Granted, some of these choices are opinionated. Is the one-humped dromedary camel really so different than the two-humped Bactrian camel? For people riding on camels, yes. But when curating my ideal emoji world, no, we only need one camel.

I decided to keep the whole body emojis and exclude the duplicate face emojis moving forward.

BY HOW THEY MOVE a

After some pruning and shuffling, we arrive at my favorite grouping:

It's a blend of "by habitat", "by major vertebrates", and "by aesthetics". This feels like a fair distribution. The amphibian is not so lonely!

You'll notice I added four "food" emojis: the crab, shrimp, squid, and lobster. I have no idea why they were assigned "food-marine" instead of "animal-marine". They look happy, healthy, and uncooked. Why not put chickens and cows and octopus as food? Don't we already have a fried shrimp emoji? I have so many questions, and so few answers.

IN CONCLUSION a

I'm still not sure why there is only one amphibian emoji. Maybe a Unicode Consortium member lobbied for salamanders, newts, and toads, but they couldn't get any traction. Maybe they were acting on underground rumors that scientists would discover a slew of new amphibian species.

Maybe the amphibian category was just a poor decision. It's hard to design for the future, and it's easy to get locked into mistakes when preserving backwards compatibility. Unicode is an ambitious project. Computers are difficult, people are difficult, and the world is full of messy data.

But I don't want to make assumptions. I'd love to stop speculating and get answers from the emoji people -- artists, linguists, and anyone contributing to the Unicode Consortium. I searched for Unicode forums and discussion threads, but to no avail. If you have any insight into emoji animal decisionmaking, let me know!

Thanks to emojipedia.org for preserving so much emoji history, and thanks to the emoji designers at Google and Microsoft for making such lovely emojis. Feel free to browse my curated emoji set at this Observable page. You can also download the source: emoji-animals.csv (6KB).