Emojis I use — and where I found them

Emojis are fantastically vague. Since any emoji can stand in for two, maybe three, emotions/intents, sometimes not even context is enough to decipher what a given emoji means.

Part of the problem is that emojis are pictograms, and when fonts change, what you used to express with :pleading_face: might no longer fit the new image.
The other part is that meanings assigned to specific pictures are somewhat arbitrary; to the point that I'm certain whoever named 😕, :confused: is secretly an alien (/j).

Tone tags are way better at expressing subtext. /g

Yet, emojis are ubiquitous. With modern advances in encodings and fonts, they can be used anywhere! And as people use them, they pick up different meanings from others, and before you know it, we are facing millions of dialects of a varied, vague emoji language.

This page is an attempt to document my own dialect of emojis—both the picture ones, and the ASCII-only ones.
I hope it helps others understand and map their part of the emoji language, so that one day, we can all understand it better.

The emojis I use

(:, 😁, 😄, and :D

The emoji I use the most has to be (:. You have probably seen it written the other way, :), as a smiley face in text messages; but I use it in reverse. To ensure variety, I also sprinkle thing up by also using 😁, 😄 and :D.

I picked (: up during my time in the Young Writers Workshop, where everyone used (: to avoid the automatic replacement of :) to 😃.
I picked the habit of littering my text messages with smileys from my mom, who has been doing that for as long as I know.

The meaning I give to (: is that of a genuine smile expressing a bit of hope, love, care, or warmth, as fits the context best. I never use it sarcastically, so it is a bit similar to the "/g" tone tag. (😁 and the rest might sometimes map to "/lh" instead.)

For example, I might say, "how are you? (:" or "the document is ready! (:"

(': and 🥲

A variation of (:, (': is a smiley face with a tear, which I would sometimes also write as a "real" emoji, 🥲. Or sometimes, if a bigger smile is needed, I would write it as :'D. In real life, I express the emoji by dramatically sweeping a finger under my eye, as if to bat away a tear.

I don't remember picking this particular emoji up from another person.

Instead, I just needed an emoji to express a particular style of joke I like to make, a bit like "/hj", where (': means either finding something funny in an otherwise bad situation, or enjoying the absurdity of extrapolating things to their worst possible outcome.

For example, I might say, "finally done editing 100 HTML tables by hand (':" or "so... fix tests today, break production tomorrow? 🥲"

(:' and 😅

I use 😅 a lot. In text, I would write it as (:'. This one I believe I picked up from good friends in the homeschooling community in Bulgaria.

To me, 😅 expresses a form of the "/hj" tone tag; however, while (': is about something absurd and unlikely, 😅 is about a joke which happens to hit too close to home or a plausible outcome worth a sweat or two.

For example, I might use this emoji in "I think there are 4 more pages of HTML to clean up (:'" or "ha, you'd like to imagine I implemented it without awk 😅"

😋

😋, also known as :yum: is my go-to tongue-in-cheek emoji. I have not yet picked up a good ASCII-only alternative to it.

I started using it after reading about what tongue-in-cheek means, and realizing I could use that to mark my more sarcastic sentences.

As such, 😋 is practically the "/s" tone tag: a mark of sarcasm or snark. For very sarcastic/snarky sentences, I might replace it by 😛, just to make it more obvious that I don't mean that.

😇, 🙃, and (:o

😇 is an innocent smile, as is (:o. I can't do as markedly-innocent smile in real life, so it's a text-only gesture for me.

(:o I know I picked up from ##werewolf. As for 😇... it's seen a lot of use right next to 😋, so I would imagine I started using 😋 and 😇 around the same time. In days past, I used to use 🙃 for the same meaning.

😇 is a bit like "/t" or "/lh"—a mark of a light-hearted tease made in passing with no ill intent.

🥺 and :c

🥺 is my "puppy eyes" emoji, back from when it looked better in pre-2023 Twemoji. I sometimes write it as :c in ASCII.

I picked up 🥺 from a very dear friend, and even started doing puppy-eyes in real life after using the emoji. :c is more recent addition, coming from the ##werewolf community on IRC.

🥺 is a mark of sympathy or sadness. It never gets used sarcastically, effectively making it a "/g" tone tag. In some contexts 🥺 might mean "please", but in the vast majority of cases, it means "what has happened to you is sad, and I feel it too".

For example I might say, "get well soon! 🥺"

😢

When it comes to shedding virtual tears, 😢 is my go-to emojis.

I believe I started using that together with 🥺, picking it up from the same friend.

😢 marks proper sadness; things I'm not just sympathizing with someone about, but deeply feeling sadness myself too. It often gets used with phrases like "I'm sorry 😢", where it marks genuine sorrow.

😭

I mentally define a partial order between sad emojis: 🥺 is almost-crying, 😢 is actually crying, and 😭 is crying a lot.

However, unlike 😢 and 🥺, my 😭 is what I use express pretend sadness, such as in a roleplay.

For example, if I'm making a joke, I might say, "wait, you mean we can't use Teams? 😭"

((: and (:(:(:

((: and (:(:(: are my emojis of choice for expressing a very strong, forced smile.

I believe the extra parentheses/repetitions are my own invention, a variation of my basic (: smiley.

The meaning of those two is a pretend smile, as might fit a roleplay.

For example, I might say, "oh, so you do like sauerkraut? (:(:(:".

:/

I use :/ to express a flat smile, perhaps slightly pushed to the side. It is very close to the 😕 emoji, which I use a very rarely, owning to its description as "confused".

I think my use of that one harks back to my Godot days—where I saw it used on IRC.

When I use it, :/ means "oof", as in, "oof :/". It marks a bad surprise, mixed with sympathy for whoever it happened to.

o.o and 😮

o.o is a raised eyebrow; and it's a part of a long scale of similar emojis, such as oo, o.o, O.o, o.o.o, and even o.O.o. In pictogram form, I usually map this to 😮, the open-mouthed face.

I picked up a form of o.o emoji when I was working on Godot, and have developed variations of it independently since. (In part inspired by a similar range of ASCII-only spiders: //o\\, //oo\\, //oOo\\, ...)

The meaning of o.o is to mark surprise, as in "that's interesting o.o". The variations with extra "eyes" or capitalized o-s are ways to mark ever-increasing amounts of surprise and curiosity.

😬

😬 is a "grimacing face"; in the real world I express it by sharply drawing air through my teeth. In fact, I first started using this emoji after needing to express my real-world reaction.

😬 means "my bad" or "oops". It expresses anxiety about something which might need correction or apology.

🤔

🤔 is everyone's favorite thinking-face emoji. I would sometimes write it out as :thinking: if I don't have an emoji input method.

In its usual meaning, 🤔 is marks of taking time to think about something. However, my use of 🤔 is often to mark something that doesn't sound right or doesn't add up.

For example, I might say "Wait, why does your diagram have HTTP running over USB? 🤔"

✨

✨ is the best sparkles emoji out there--to the point that I write it out as :sparkles: in text.

I started using it a lot after seeing a friend use it for everything.

✨ means inner happiness and bliss; being excited about something, and enjoying it deeply. For example, "Look, a hedgehog! ✨✨"

🎉

🎉, also known as :tada: is my preferred party-ing emoji.

I use 🎉 to mean external celebration; being happy about things achieved, not in the quiet way of ✨, but in a louder, more-visible way. For example, "I published a new blog post! 🎉🎉".

💚

There are a lot of heart emojis out there. At some point, I color-coded them... but nowadays, I only use the green heart, 💚.

💚 is a general expression of thanks or (depending on context) platonic love/care. You could also interpret it as a platonic hug, but chances are, my shy real-life self would not do that.

😊 and ☺️

I use 😊, ☺️, and :blush: interchangeably to mark a warm, unforced/unbidden smile.

I think I picked that from the Young Writers Workshop.

The meaning of 😊 is either "thanks" or "you are welcome" depending on context. When thanking someone, I would use 💚 for larger services rendered, and 😊 for smaller things that made my day.

👀

I use the eyes emoji, 👀, almost exclusively as a reaction. It does not map to the o.o ASCII emoji mentioned earlier.

I picked up the usage from listening to a FOSDEM staff member explain how they use 👀 to mark in-progress issues and ✅ to mark solved issues in chats.

Likewise, in my chat use, a 👀 reaction means "I saw this, but have not fully acted on it yet"; a read receipt, if you will.

Closing thoughts

A lot of emoji use is contextual—depending on the sentence it is used with, the channel it is communicated on, and even the exact people it is communicated to. For example, while I usually use 👀 as a reaction as described above, if a friend sends "I see you 👀", I might reply with 👀 to mean "I see that you see me".

As such, no list of emoji usages is exhaustive. I have only outlined ones I use the most, especially in meanings different from their most "common" one.

In a time of meaningless emoji use by Large Language Models, I hope you enjoyed this small bit of intentional emoji use by a human. ☺️

Bonus: the emojis I never use

Here is a short list of the most common emojis I avoid:

• 🙂—the "serial killer" smile; most fonts render this emoji as blank and unemotional as possible. It's ugly, use 😃 instead. Acceptable only if it's the result of auto-replacement.
• 🤣—the "rolling on the floor laughing". It's hard to get me laughing this much; I prefer 😂 instead.
• 💀—the "dead laughing" skull; I detest this one. In my opinion, the skull emoji fits only for morbid shouldn't-laugh-at-it humor, everywhere else, it's rather tasteless.
• 🤦—the "facepalm" emoji. Unreadable at smaller sizes; prefer an abbreviated *fp* instead.

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