This emoji trivia quiz runs 70 free questions with answers in two flavours. Roughly a third are decode-the-emoji puzzles: strings like π¦π or π·πΈοΈ that stand for a film, a book, a band or an idiom, with four titles to choose from. The rest are about emoji themselves: where the word comes from, who drew the first sets on Japanese phones, why flags are secretly pairs of letters, which face Oxford Dictionaries made Word of the Year, and how the poop emoji went from a Gmail Easter egg to a movie role for Sir Patrick Stewart. It works as an emoji trivia game for a party, a classroom warm-up or a quick solo round on your phone. The puzzles are easy by design; the history questions climb from simple to genuinely obscure, so a perfect score takes more than a good keyboard. Every answer is checked against a cited source, mostly Wikipedia's emoji, Unicode and film articles, so the dates and names hold up if someone argues.
30 of 70 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word "emoji" comes from two Japanese words. What do they literally mean?
Picture + character
The resemblance to the English words emotion and emoticon is pure coincidence; the Japanese term originally just meant pictograph.
Q 02Which emoji was Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year in 2015?
Face with tears of joy
Oxford's research found it made up 20% of all emoji used in the UK that year, and 17% in the US.
Q 03Shigetaka Kurita designed 176 emoji in 1999 for the i-mode service of which company?
NTT DoCoMo
Kurita drew on manga symbols, weather pictograms, Chinese characters and street signs, working on a 12-by-12-pixel grid.
Q 04In 2016 which institution acquired the original 1999 Japanese emoji set for its permanent collection?
The Museum of Modern Art
The set was shown in an exhibition titled Inbox: The Original Emoji, by Shigetaka Kurita, and returned in the museum's 2025 design-icons show.
Q 05On what date is World Emoji Day celebrated each year?
17 July
Apple has used the day since 2017 to preview the next batch of emoji coming to iOS.
Q 06What did Apple premiere on 17 July 2002, the date shown on its calendar emoji?
Its iCal app
Google switched its own calendar emoji to show the same date in 2016; WhatsApp's shows 24 February, the company's founding date.
Q 07Who founded the reference site Emojipedia in 2013 and went on to invent World Emoji Day?
Jeremy Burge
Burge said the idea came when Apple added emoji to iOS 6 but never said which ones were new. Stephen Fry called the site "a kind of Académie française for your iPhone".
Q 08Scott Fahlman proposed the :-) and :-( emoticons in 1982 on which school's bulletin board?
Carnegie Mellon University
Fahlman suggested the colon-hyphen-bracket as a label for "attempted humor", to stop jokes being misread on the board.
Q 09Which Unicode Standard edition, released in October 2010, added a standard set of 722 emoji?
6.0
Feedback from standards bodies in the US, Europe and Japan settled the list; the same release defined the "regional indicator" letters that later became flags.
Q 10Which American company first pushed for emoji standardisation, petitioning the Unicode Technical Committee in 2007?
Mark Davis, Kat Momoi and Markus Scherer began the effort; Apple's Peter Edberg and Yasuo Kida joined, and the formal proposal for 625 characters came in January 2009.
Q 11Which 2011 iOS version made Apple's emoji keyboard available outside Japan?
iOS 5
Before that, users outside Japan could unlock the keyboard by installing a Japanese app, which is largely how the craze spread to the US.
Q 12The skin-tone modifiers added to emoji in 2015 are based on which dermatological classification?
Fitzpatrick scale
The scale has six types; the two lightest were merged, which is why emoji offer five tones rather than six.
Q 13How many skin-tone modifier characters can be attached to a human emoji?
Five
Without a modifier, a human emoji is supposed to render in a deliberately unrealistic colour such as bright yellow, blue or gray.
Q 21Fred Benenson's crowdsourced emoji translation of which novel did the Library of Congress acquire in 2013?
Moby-Dick
Titled Emoji Dick, it was funded on Kickstarter and translated sentence by sentence by Amazon Mechanical Turk workers.
Q 22The short-lived 2014 social app Emojli, built by Tom Scott and Natalie Gray, had what defining restriction?
Messages and usernames could only be emoji
It began largely as a joke, yet 70,000 emoji-only usernames were reserved by launch day; it shut down in July 2015.
Q 23Which celebrity's 2015 emoji app reportedly earned $1 million a minute at launch?
Kim Kardashian
Q 14Flag emoji are not single characters. They are pairs of "regional indicator" letters that spell out what?
The nation's two-letter ISO code
Only 270 of the 676 possible letter pairs are valid regions, and Unicode leaves it to each platform to decide which flags to actually draw.
Q 15In 2022 the Unicode Consortium stopped accepting proposals for which category of emoji?
Flags
New ones in that category are still added automatically whenever a territory gains an ISO 3166-1 code, no proposal needed.
Q 16In Japan the π© emoji is commonly sent to wish someone what?
Good luck
The link comes from Kin no Unko, golden poo charms sold in Kyoto: the Japanese word for poo sounds like the word for luck.
Q 17The original 2007 Gmail version of the poop emoji had no face, but it did include which detail?
Animated flies circling it
The Doodle artists who drew it worked in a 15-by-15-pixel box using only the colours of the Google logo; a smiling face was added years later.
Q 18Among Gen Z texters, the π emoji most often stands for which phrase?
I'm dying of laughter
It took over from the laughing-crying face, which younger users came to see as an emoji "for boomers".
Q 19A 2016 Emojipedia analysis found what share of peach-emoji tweets actually referred to the fruit?
7%
Apple tried to redesign the peach that year to look less like a backside, met fierce backlash in beta and reversed course before release.
Q 20In iOS 10 (2016) Apple redesigned its gun emoji from a realistic revolver into what?
A toy water pistol
The very next day Microsoft went the other way, swapping its toy ray gun for a real revolver; by 2018 nearly everyone had followed Apple.
Kimoji offered more than 250 icons and GIFs and grew into a merchandise line, including a fragrance released on World Emoji Day 2018.
Q 24Which distinguished actor voiced the character Poop in The Emoji Movie (2017)?
Patrick Stewart
Jordan Peele said he was offered the part first and that the offer helped convince him to retire from acting.
Q 25The Emoji Movie became the first animated film ever to win which award at the Golden Raspberries?
Worst Picture
It took four Razzies in total, despite grossing $218 million worldwide on a $50 million budget.
Q 26Which keyboard shortcut opens the emoji panel on Windows 10 and 11?
Win + .
It arrived in Windows 10 version 1803; on a Mac the equivalent is Control + Command + Space.
Q 27The much-loved "blob" emoji were retired in 2017 with which release of Android?
Oreo
The blobs had arrived with KitKat in 2013; they later returned as stickers and in Gboard's Emoji Kitchen mash-ups.
Q 28Several Apple emoji contain tiny text lifted from which famous Apple ad?
Think different
The hidden copy begins "Here's to the crazy ones..."; Apple's emoji glyphs are stored as PNG images at seven different sizes.
Q 29Emojination was founded in 2015 after its creators noticed there was no emoji for which food?
Dumpling
Founders Jennifer 8. Lee and Yiying Lu raised the $7,500 Unicode membership fee on Kickstarter and have since co-authored more than sixty proposals, including the disco ball.
Q 30The π¦ emoji was added in 2018 mainly to raise awareness of what?
Mosquito-borne diseases
The following year a drop-of-blood emoji arrived with a similar aim: breaking the stigma around menstruation.