Emoji Trivia
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This emoji trivia quiz runs 119 free questions with answers in two flavours. Roughly a third are decode-the-emoji puzzles: strings like 🦁👑 or 🐷🕸️ 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 119 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What do the two Japanese words that make up "emoji" literally mean?
Picture + character
Picture + character: e means picture and moji means character, so the word's likeness to "emotion" and "emoticon" is pure coincidence.
Q 02Which emoji was Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year in 2015?
Face with tears of joy
Face with tears of joy won because Oxford's research with SwiftKey found it was the most used emoji worldwide in 2015.
Q 03Shigetaka Kurita designed 176 emoji in 1999 for the i-mode service of which company?
NTT DoCoMo
NTT DoCoMo's 176 icons were an instant hit, but rival carriers built their own sets, which often wouldn't display on each other's phones.
Q 04In 2016 which institution acquired the original 1999 Japanese emoji set for its permanent collection?
The Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art received the 176 icons as a gift from their maker and hailed them as seeds of a new visual language.
Q 05What did Apple share on World Emoji Day in 2017?
A preview of upcoming emoji
A preview of upcoming emoji such as Woman with Headscarf and Breastfeeding, which Apple said would help people express more diversity.
Q 06Which tower, modelled on the Eiffel Tower, does the 🗼 emoji depict?
Tokyo Tower
Tokyo Tower was planned as an antenna for radio and television broadcasting, not merely as a tourist landmark.
Q 07Who founded the reference site Emojipedia in 2013 and went on to invent World Emoji Day?
Jeremy Burge
Jeremy Burge started the site as a pet project after an iOS update added emoji and he couldn't find a list of which ones were new.
Q 08Scott Fahlman proposed the :-) and :-( emoticons in 1982 on which school's bulletin board?
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University's bulletin board kept missing sarcasm, sparking long angry replies, so Fahlman proposed a joke marker.
Q 09In 2017 a tech CEO pledged to "drop everything" to fix the layering in which food emoji?
Hamburger
Hamburger: Android's design put the cheese beneath the patty, and after the CEO's pledge a redesign moved it on top.
Q 10Which American company first pushed for emoji standardisation, petitioning the Unicode Technical Committee in 2007?
Google's internationalization team saw emoji booming in Japan and argued they belonged in the standard; Apple engineers joined the proposal in 2009.
Q 11Before 2011, downloading what unlocked the iPhone's hidden emoji keyboard?
A third-party app
A third-party app: Apple had built the keyboard for the Japanese market, and only iOS 5 let everyone switch it on in 2011.
Q 12The skin-tone modifiers added to emoji in 2015 are based on which dermatological classification?
Fitzpatrick scale
Fitzpatrick scale types lie behind the modifiers, which Unicode added in response to concerns that most human emoji looked white.
Q 13How many skin-tone modifier characters does Unicode offer for human emoji?
Five
Five: the dermatology scale behind them has six types, but its two lightest were merged into a single modifier.
Q 21Fred Benenson's crowdsourced emoji translation of which novel did the Library of Congress acquire in 2013?
Moby-Dick
Moby-Dick was translated line by line by paid Mechanical Turk workers, with the costs raised through a Kickstarter campaign.
Q 22Tom Scott and Natalie Gray's app Emojli had what defining rule?
Messages and usernames could only be emoji
Messages and usernames could only be emoji; 70,000 names were reserved before launch, and the upkeep led its makers to shut it in 2015.
Q 23Which celebrity's 2015 emoji app reportedly earned $1 million a minute at launch?
Kim Kardashian
Q 14Flag emoji are built from "regional indicator" symbols that spell out which of a nation's codes?
The nation's two-letter ISO code
The nation's two-letter ISO code, such as DE for Germany; each platform then decides which of those letter pairs to draw as flags.
Q 15Which new emoji led the 2014 news frenzy that flooded Emojipedia with visitors?
Middle finger
Middle finger: the rush of visitors to Emojipedia's list of new emoji knocked the site offline.
Q 16In Japan the 💩 emoji can be used to wish someone what?
Good luck
Good luck: the Japanese word for poo, unko, starts with the same sound as the word for luck, the pun behind gold poo charms.
Q 17Gmail's original poop emoji had no face, but which detail did it include?
Animated flies circling it
Animated flies circling it were its designer's proudest touch: he said they brought it to life so you could almost smell it.
Q 18Among Gen Z texters, the 💀 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 19In a 2016 beta, Apple made which fruit emoji look less like a bum?
Peach
Peach: a later beta brought back its bum-like curves before the update reached the public.
Q 20In iOS 10 (2016) Apple redesigned its gun emoji from a realistic revolver into what?
A toy water pistol
A toy water pistol, and by 2018 the other major platforms had dropped realistic guns too, until X turned its version back into a firearm in 2024.
Kim Kardashian's Kimoji topped the paid App Store chart and set off a wave of celebrity emoji apps, from StephMoji to Hillarymoji.
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
Worst Picture was one of four Razzies for a film that still grossed about $218 million worldwide on a $50 million budget.
Q 26Which keyboard shortcut opens the emoji panel on Windows 10 and 11?
Win + .
Win + . opens the Emoji Panel, which Microsoft added in a 2017 Windows 10 preview after users asked for an easier way to type emoji.
Q 27Android's "blob" emoji were retired in 2017 with which release of Android?
Oreo
Oreo swapped the blobs for round faces because they were read differently on other platforms, though they later returned as sticker packs.
Q 28Several Apple emoji contain tiny text lifted from which famous Apple ad?
Think different
Think different was narrated by Richard Dreyfuss, because first choice Robin Williams wouldn't appear in advertising.
Q 29Emojination was founded in 2015 after its creators noticed there was no emoji for which food?
Dumpling
Dumpling: finding none, founders Jennifer 8. Lee and Yiying Lu crowdfunded a Unicode membership on Kickstarter to campaign for one.
Q 30The 🦟 emoji was added in 2018 mainly to raise awareness of what?
Mosquito-borne diseases
Mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue drove the proposal, which pitched the emoji as a way for health professionals to reach the public.