Emoji
Emoji Categories Explained: The 10 Groups and What Is in Them
· 4 min read
Every emoji belongs to one of ten groups defined by the Unicode Consortium: Smileys & Emotion, People & Body, Component, Animals & Nature, Food & Drink, Travel & Places, Activities, Objects, Symbols and Flags. Phone keyboards, emoji pickers and the emoji categories on Emojar all follow this order, which is why the tabs look so similar on every device.
Where the categories come from
Unicode doesn't only assign codes to emojis; it also publishes an ordering file that sorts every emoji into a group and, inside it, a subgroup. "Food & Drink", for example, contains the subgroups food-fruit, food-vegetable, food-prepared, food-asian, food-sweet, drink and dishware. The ordering exists so that emoji pickers, fonts and search results agree on where things live, even though each company draws its own pictures.
The groups change slowly. New emojis join an existing group each year — a new fruit lands in Food & Drink, a new hand gesture in People & Body — but the ten groups themselves have been stable for years.
The ten groups at a glance
Counts are from Emojar's catalogue of 3,789 emojis (Unicode 16.0), including every skin-tone and gender variant:
| Group | Emojis | Typical examples |
|---|---|---|
| Smileys & Emotion | 169 | 😀 😂 🥹 😡 ❤️ 💯 |
| People & Body | 2,261 | 👋 🧑💻 👩🍳 💪 🏃 |
| Component | 9 | skin tones 🏻 🏿, hair 🦰 🦳 |
| Animals & Nature | 159 | 🐶 🦊 🌵 🌸 🌍 |
| Food & Drink | 131 | 🍎 🍕 🍜 ☕ 🍷 |
| Travel & Places | 218 | 🚗 ✈️ 🏠 🗽 🌙 |
| Activities | 85 | ⚽ 🎮 🎉 🏆 🎨 |
| Objects | 264 | 📱 💡 📚 🔑 💊 |
| Symbols | 223 | ✅ ⚠️ ♻️ ➡️ 🔤 |
| Flags | 270 | 🇩🇪 🇯🇵 🏳️🌈 🏁 |
You can browse each group on the emoji categories page, or see everything sorted by name in the A–Z list.
Why People & Body is so large
People & Body holds 2,261 emojis — more than all the other groups combined. Most of them aren't separate ideas but variants. A thumbs-up exists in a default yellow plus five skin tones, and professions such as 🧑⚕️ come as a person, a man and a woman, each in six tones. Of the 2,261, only 386 are base emojis; the other 1,880 are skin-tone versions.
Couples and families multiply quickly too: "kiss" and "couple with heart" have versions for every pairing of genders and skin tones. That is why the People tab on your phone shows one face with a small marker — long-press it to open the variants instead of scrolling through all of them.
What the Component group is for
Component is the strangest group: nine emojis — five skin-tone swatches (🏻 🏼 🏽 🏾 🏿) and four hair styles (red, curly, white and bald). They are building blocks. On their own they show as a coloured square or a small symbol; joined to another emoji they change it. 👋 followed by the medium skin-tone modifier becomes 👋🏽, and "person" + zero-width joiner + "red hair" becomes 🧑🦰. Most keyboards hide this group because you never need to type the pieces separately.
Symbols and Flags
Symbols is a mixed bag of everything that isn't a picture of a thing: hearts that aren't feelings in a face, arrows, zodiac signs, warning signs, check marks, the 🅰️ and 🅱️ buttons, and keycaps from 0️⃣ to 🔟. If you can't find an icon-like emoji anywhere else, it's probably here.
Flags has 270 entries: 259 country and territory flags, eight other flags such as 🏁 and 🏳️🌈, and three subdivision flags (England, Scotland and Wales). Country flags aren't drawn as single characters; each is a pair of regional indicator letters — 🇩🇪 is the letters D and E — and the device turns the pair into a flag. Windows doesn't draw country flags, so on a Windows PC you see the two letters instead.
Using categories to find the right emoji
Categories are useful when you know roughly what you want but not its name:
- Looking for a mood? Smileys & Emotion, then the heart subgroups for love and support.
- A job or activity? People & Body has person-role emojis such as 🧑🏫 and 🧑🔧; sports equipment is in Activities.
- An object for a presentation? Objects covers office, tools, household items and medical symbols.
- A label or status? Symbols has check marks, warning signs and arrows.
When you do know a word, searching is faster: the Emoji Search matches names and keywords across all ten groups, and every emoji page shows its group, subgroup and Unicode version. For a printable or design-ready version of any emoji, use Emoji to PNG.
Common questions
Is Component a "real" category? Yes, it's one of the ten official Unicode groups, but its emojis are modifiers meant to be combined with others.
Why do categories look slightly different on my phone? Some keyboards merge or rename groups — for example, combining Smileys and People into one tab — but the order underneath follows Unicode.
Do new emojis ever create a new category? Not in recent years. Each annual release adds emojis to the existing groups, so the ten categories stay the same.