Hidden Emoji Tricks You Didn't Know About

Emoji Are Deeper Than You Think

Pick a face, tap send. That's how most people use emoji, and there's nothing wrong with it.

But there's a whole layer underneath that surface-level stuff. OS-level hidden features. Unicode tricks that work everywhere. Actual Easter eggs the designers buried for fun. Some of this is nerdy, some is practical, and some is just cool party-trick material.

I've been collecting these while building emodji.com, and these are my favorites.

1. Combine Emoji Into New Ones (ZWJ Sequences)

OK, this is the mind-blowing one. There's an invisible character called the Zero Width Joiner (ZWJ) that glues emoji together to create entirely new ones.

For example:

• 👩 + ZWJ + 🚀 = 👩‍🚀 (woman astronaut)
• 🏳️ + ZWJ + 🌈 = 🏳️‍🌈 (rainbow flag)
• 👨 + ZWJ + 👩 + ZWJ + 👧 + ZWJ + 👦 = 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 (family)
• 🐻 + ZWJ + ❄️ = 🐻‍❄️ (polar bear)

You can't type ZWJ from a normal keyboard — you need to copy it or use a tool. Our ZWJ sequences article goes deep on the technical side if you're into that.

The practical takeaway: most ZWJ emoji already exist as pre-built options in your emoji keyboard. But knowing they're secretly combinations explains that annoying thing where someone sends you 👩‍🚀 and you see 👩🚀 as two separate emoji. Your device doesn't support that ZWJ combo, so it falls apart into pieces.

2. Secret Emoji Keyboard Combos on iPhone

iOS is hiding stuff from you. Here's what they don't advertise:

Hold to reveal variants. Long-press on any people emoji to see skin tone options. Most people know this. What fewer people know is that some emoji have multiple variants beyond skin tone:

• Long-press the couple emoji to change both people's skin tones independently
• Long-press direction-facing emoji (like 🚶) to reverse their direction (added in iOS 17)

Predictive emoji replacement. Type a message in regular text, then tap the emoji keyboard button. iOS highlights every word it can replace with an emoji in orange. Tap the highlighted words to swap them. This is way faster than searching for individual emoji. Emoji search. Swipe down on the emoji keyboard to reveal the search bar. Type "pizza" and every pizza-related emoji appears. This search also finds kaomoji on newer iOS versions.

3. Google Emoji Kitchen (Android Exclusive)

This is the one that makes iPhone users jealous. Gboard (Google's keyboard) has a feature called Emoji Kitchen that lets you Frankenstein two emoji together into custom sticker-style mashups. Not real Unicode emoji — they're auto-generated stickers — but they're wildly fun.

Try it:

1. Open any messaging app

2. Open Gboard's emoji keyboard

3. Tap any emoji

4. The suggestion strip above the keyboard shows mashups with recently used emoji

5. Tap a mashup to send it as a sticker

Some favorites:

• 😎 + 🔥 = a cool face with flames
• 🥺 + 💀 = a pleading skull
• 😂 + 👻 = a laughing ghost
• 🤠 + 😈 = a devil cowboy

Over 50,000 possible combinations. Not all pairs work (unsupported ones just show nothing), but when they hit, they hit. Devil cowboy? Come on. That's art. These mashups work as images in any app that supports stickers — more on that in our sticker guide.

4. The Invisible Emoji Trick

This one's a bit sneaky. Several invisible Unicode characters exist that you can slip between or around emoji:

• Zero Width Space (U+200B) — invisible space that takes up zero room
• Zero Width Non-Joiner (U+200C) — prevents ZWJ combinations from forming
• Zero Width Joiner (U+200D) — the combiner mentioned above

These have practical uses:

Break up emoji for effect. Normally, adjacent emoji sit right next to each other. Insert a zero-width space between them and they still look adjacent but behave as separate elements (useful for screen readers and text processing). Prevent auto-linking. Some platforms auto-link certain character sequences. Inserting an invisible character can break the auto-detection while keeping the visible text unchanged. Create "empty" messages. On some platforms, you can send a message that appears completely blank — just invisible characters, nothing visible. Works on WhatsApp and a few other apps. Absolutely useless. People go crazy for it.

5. Emoji Modifier Stacking

Beyond skin tones, there are other modifiers you can apply to emoji:

Variation Selectors. Adding U+FE0F (Variation Selector 16) after certain characters forces them to render as colorful emoji instead of plain text. Adding U+FE0E (Variation Selector 15) does the opposite — forces text rendering.

For example, ❤ without a variation selector might render as text (a simple heart shape) in some contexts. Add U+FE0F and it becomes ❤️ — the full-color red heart emoji. This is why some hearts look different in different apps.

You can experiment with this using our unicode lookup tool.

Directional modifiers. Right-to-left marks and left-to-right marks can change how emoji sequences display in bidirectional text. This matters in Arabic, Hebrew, and other RTL languages where emoji direction can flip unexpectedly.

6. Platform-Specific Easter Eggs

Apple

• Type "happy birthday" in iMessage and the background fills with balloons
• Type "congratulations" for confetti
• Type "pew pew" for a laser light show
• These work with emoji too — send 🎉🎉🎉 and iMessage may trigger effects

Google

• In Google Chat, certain emoji trigger animated effects
• The Emoji Kitchen feature (mentioned above) is itself kind of an Easter egg — Google never heavily promoted it

WhatsApp

• Send a single ❤️ (red heart) in WhatsApp and it animates with a heartbeat pulse
• Some other single-emoji messages also animate on both iOS and Android

Slack

• Type `:partyparrot:` for the legendary party parrot
• Slack supports custom emoji, so every workspace can have its own hidden gems
• React with `:eyes:` on a message to add it to the "All Unreads" view (depends on workspace settings)

7. The Reverse Text Trick

Unicode includes directional override characters that can make text (and emoji) appear reversed:

Drop the Right-to-Left Override character (U+202E) before a sequence of emoji and it flips their visual order. So 🔴🟡🟢 shows up as 🟢🟡🔴 on screen, even though the underlying text hasn't changed.

This is mostly a fun trick for messing with friends in group chats. It works in most messaging apps but not all — some strip directional overrides for security reasons (they have been used in phishing attacks to disguise file extensions).

8. Flag Emoji Are Actually Two Letters

Every country flag emoji is secretly two characters in a trench coat. The 🇺🇸 US flag isn't one symbol — it's the regional indicators for "U" and "S" standing next to each other.

What this means in practice:

• On systems that don't support flag emoji, you just see letter pairs (US, FR, JP, etc.)
• You could theoretically create flag sequences for any two-letter combo, but only ISO 3166-1 country codes are officially supported
• Windows famously doesn't render most flag emoji — just shows you the letters. Classic Windows.

Try looking up any flag on our wiki to see the underlying character codes.

9. Emoji in Unexpected Places

Places you might not have tried using emoji:

• Wi-Fi network names. Your router lets you use emoji in the SSID. "🏠 Home WiFi" is a valid network name.
• Passwords. Most modern systems accept emoji in passwords. The character space is massive, making brute-force attacks way harder. (Should you actually do this? Debatable. Some systems still choke on non-ASCII input, and good luck typing 🔐 on a hotel business center PC.)
• Git commit messages. `git commit -m "🐛 fix login bug"` works perfectly. Many open-source projects use emoji prefixes as a convention (gitmoji).
• Domain names. Some TLDs support internationalized domain names that can include emoji. 💩.la was a real domain. Most registrars have moved away from this, but it was wild while it lasted.
• Spreadsheets. Emoji work in Excel and Google Sheets cell values, formatting, and even chart labels.

For more on using emoji in technical contexts, check our developer guide.

10. The "Did You Know" Collection

Rapid-fire round. Things I bring up at parties that nobody asked about:

• There is an emoji for every blood type. 🅰️🅱️🅾️🆎 — these exist because blood type is a big deal in Japanese culture (similar to horoscopes in the West).
• The 📧 emoji isn't an envelope with an @. It's officially "e-mail" and some platforms render it with an "E" instead of "@".
• 🔰 is a Japanese beginner driver symbol. It has no meaning in most Western countries but is one of the earliest emoji.
• The information desk person 💁 was designed for a hotel concierge. The sass was unintentional.
• 😐 and 😑 look similar but are different. One has open eyes (neutral face), the other has closed eyes (expressionless face).

You can look up the official meaning and history of any emoji on our emoji wiki. Every entry shows the Unicode name, the year it was added, and how it renders across all major platforms.