Random Emoji Generator

Draw random emoji from 1,914 and copy them in one tap

Press Draw and the generator picks as many random emoji as you ask for from the categories you leave on, out of 1,914 Unicode emoji. Every slot shows the emoji's English name, and selecting a slot copies that emoji right away. You can lock the slots you like and redraw only the rest, so it's easy to keep rolling until a combination works.

Emoji are not the same as stickers. An emoji such as 😀 is a text character that you type from a phone keyboard and send like any other letter. A messenger sticker is a picture, so it can't be copied as text and pasted into another app, and none are included here. Each emoji you meet for the first time is filled in with color in "My emoji collection" below, so you can also see how many you've found so far.

When a random emoji comes in handy

• Story and drawing prompts: choose "One per category" and leave only People, Animals, Travel and Objects on to get four ingredients at once. If you draw 🧑‍🍳, 🦔, 🏰 and 🔑, you could write about a chef and a hedgehog who lost the castle key. It works for classroom writing exercises, sketching practice and improv prompts.
• Group games: one player acts out the drawn emoji without speaking while the others guess, or everyone has to make up a sentence using three drawn emoji. Full screen shows the emoji large, and the space bar draws the next one.
• Meeting emoji you never use: in the usage data the Unicode Consortium published in 2019, 😂 was the most used emoji, and the emoji in the less-used half were used over 2,048 times less than 😂. Your keyboard's recent list keeps showing the same few, while random draws introduce emoji you didn't even know had a name.
• Decorating posts and profiles: when you need emoji for a post or a group announcement, turn on just one category such as Food or Travel and draw 3 to 5 to find a set that fits the mood.

How to use it

1. Choose categories: turn the 9 categories on and off, from Smileys & Emotion to Flags. All start on, and at least one must stay on. The bar under each category shows how much of it you've filled in your collection.
2. Set the number: pick 1, 3, 5 or 10, or enter 1 to 100 under "Custom". "One per category" draws one emoji from each category that is on. Changing the categories or the number redraws every slot that isn't locked. Slots changed this way don't count toward your collection, because you didn't press Draw.
3. Draw: press Draw and the slots spin like a slot machine, then stop one by one from the left. Press again while they spin to stop at once. An emoji you meet for the first time gets a "New" label.
4. Copy and lock: select a slot to copy that emoji. The info line below shows its name, category, code (U+…) and the year it first appeared. The pin at the top right of a slot, or "Lock this slot" in the info line, keeps that slot when you draw again. Locked slots also stay when you lower the number or turn their category off. With more than 10 slots the tiles get small and hide the names, so lock from the info line.
5. Copy everything at once: "Copy" joins the drawn emoji into one string, and "Copy with names" copies one emoji and name per line. "Copy link" builds an address for the current result, and anyone who opens it sees the same emoji.
6. Collection and favorites: in the collection tabs, pick a category to see found emoji in color and the rest as gray shadows. Select a found emoji to copy it. Emoji you save with "Add to favorites" collect in the Favorites tab, where you can copy them all together.

How many emoji in each category

Unicode's emoji-test.txt 18.0, the list meant for testing keyboards and displays, contains 3,963 fully-qualified emoji once skin-tone variants are counted. Counting the skin-tone variants as one gives 1,923, and this generator uses the 1,914 of them that exist up to Emoji 17.0. The woman, man and gender-neutral versions of the same profession are counted as separate emoji.

Of the 270 flags, 262 are country and region flags and the other 8 are flags such as the chequered flag (🏁) and the rainbow flag (🏳️‍🌈). With every category on, roughly 1 draw in 7 is a flag, so turn the Flags category off if you don't need them.

Emoji added each year

New emoji join the Unicode standard a little at a time every year. The table below splits this generator's 1,914 emoji by the year they first appeared. The largest group, 719, entered the standard in 2010, mostly based on the emoji of Japanese mobile carriers, and recent years add only around 10 a year. "Emoji 3.0 (2016)" in the info line means that version and year.

Many devices can't draw the 2024 and 2025 emoji yet, so the table gives their names instead. Of the 28 emoji from 2023, 18 are existing emoji such as the person walking and the person in a wheelchair, redrawn to face right, and 4 are family combinations of an adult and a child.

Your odds, and how many draws it takes to fill the collection

Every emoji in the candidate pool is equally likely. When you press Draw, the browser's cryptographic random source (Web Crypto) supplies a 32-bit number that is reduced to the number of candidates. The leftover range that would favor some candidates is discarded and a new number is requested, so with N candidates a specific emoji lands in a given slot with probability exactly 1/N. When you draw several slots, the chance that one specific emoji appears in the result is:

No repeats: m ÷ N

Repeats allowed: 1 − (1 − 1/N)^m

m = number of slots being drawn

Filling the whole collection takes longer than you might expect, because the more emoji you've already found, the less likely each draw is to turn up a new one. This is the classic "coupon collector's problem": finding all N takes N × (1 + 1/2 + … + 1/N) draws on average. The table shows the average when you draw one emoji at a time. Drawing 10 at a time without repeats cuts the number of draws to roughly a tenth, and slightly lower still because there are no repeats within a draw.

Half of all 1,914 emoji show up after 1,326 draws on average, but the other half takes more than 14,000 further draws. That is why the collection bars fill quickly at first and then slow down.

Changing skin tones

The default color of people and hand emoji is yellow, which isn't meant to be a real skin tone. In 2015 (Unicode 8.0) Unicode added five modifier characters for changing skin tone, based on the six types of the Fitzpatrick scale used in dermatology, with types 1 and 2 merged into one. In this generator, 330 of the 1,914 emoji can change skin tone.

• Default or one of five tones: select a hand in the skin-tone row and that tone is used for the unlocked slots and for every slot you draw next. Locked slots keep the tone they had when you locked them. Emoji with no skin tone, such as animals and food, stay as they are.
• Random: each slot that can change tone gets its own pick from the five.
• Tones that came late: 🤝 handshake appeared in 2016, but its skin-tone variants arrived only in 2021 (Emoji 14.0), and 👯 people with bunny ears and 🤼 people wrestling got theirs in 2025 (Emoji 17.0). If your device can't draw those variants, the default color is used.

Why emoji look different, or show up as boxes

Emoji are text, so their look comes from your device's font. The same 🦊 looks a little different on iPhone, Android and Windows, and an emoji newer than your device's font appears as an empty box (□) or a question mark. When the page first opens, it draws, on a canvas that isn't shown, the first emoji of each version from 2018 (Emoji 11.0) on, and leaves out the emoji of any version your device can't draw as pictures. Emoji from 2017 and earlier are included without a check. The result appears under the options as something like "up to Emoji 15.1 (2023)".

Some computers show flags as two letters such as "KR" instead of a picture. On those devices the 262 country and region flags are left out and only the 8 other flags, such as the chequered flag, remain. If you're choosing emoji to send to someone else's phone, turn on "Include emoji this device can't show" to put them all in the pool.

Emoji built from several emoji joined by an invisible connector (ZWJ, U+200D), such as 🧑‍🚀 astronaut, can fall apart into pieces like 🧑🚀 on older devices. You can still guess the meaning, but the look changes, so if the other person's device is old, older emoji are the safer choice.

Common points of confusion

• One emoji is not always one character: 👍🏽 is a thumbs-up plus a skin-tone modifier, and the 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 family is 7 code points (11 UTF-16 code units). Where there is a character limit, an emoji can count as two or more, so check it with the social media character counter.
• "No repeated emoji in one draw" applies to a single draw: emoji don't repeat within one result or against locked slots, but an emoji from an earlier draw can come up again next time. If you only want emoji you haven't seen, turn on the categories whose collection bars are least full.
• Names may differ from your keyboard's search terms: the name under each slot is the short English name from the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR). The names a phone keyboard searches by vary a little from maker to maker.
• Emoji are not stickers: messenger stickers are pictures, so they can't be copied and pasted into another app. The emoji here are text characters, so you can paste them into messages, email and documents.

Limits and cautions

• The 9 emoji of Emoji 18.0, announced on September 15, 2026, are left out for now because the CLDR name data in five languages isn't out yet. They'll be added when it is.
• Device detection tests only one emoji per version. A device that draws just part of a version can still show some boxes. In browsers whose privacy settings block canvas reading, no detection is done and all 1,914 emoji are included.
• All candidates are equally likely. There is no weighting to make popular emoji come up more often.
• The collection, favorites and draw count are saved only in this browser and are never sent to a server. They disappear if you clear browser data or close a private window, and they don't carry over to other devices.
• In very old browsers without Web Crypto, Math.random is used instead.

As of The emoji list on this page and in the tool was built from Unicode emoji-test.txt 18.0 (2026-04-30) and the CLDR 48.2 name data, and versions and years follow the version table in UTS #51 Revision 31. Checked against the sources on 2026-10-22.

Sources

• 01Unicode Technical Standard #51: Unicode Emoji (Revision 31)Table of Emoji versions and release dates (E0.6 2010-10-11 to E18.0 2026-09-15); section 2.4 Diversity: five skin-tone modifiers based on the six Fitzpatrick types
• 02Unicode emoji-test.txt, Version 18.0Groups, versions and the 3,963 fully-qualified emoji; the source of this tool's candidates
• 03Unicode CLDR: Short Names and KeywordsShort emoji names (this tool uses CLDR 48.2 names in Korean, English, Japanese, Spanish and Indonesian)
• 04Unicode Consortium: Emoji Frequency (2019)😂 is the most used emoji; emoji below the median are used less than 1/2,048 as often as 😂; new emoji score low because they take time to reach devices
• 05MDN: Crypto.getRandomValues()The Web Crypto function that fills an array with cryptographically secure random numbers

Frequently asked questions

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