Common Emoji Code Points and UTF-8 Encoding

Common Emoji in Unicode

Most emoji reside on the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (Plane 1) at code points U+1F300 and above. Because they exceed U+FFFF, they require special handling in UTF-16 (surrogate pairs) and use 4 bytes in UTF-8.

Popular Emoji Code Points

Emoji	Code Point	UTF-8 Bytes	UTF-16 Units	Name
😀	U+1F600	F0 9F 98 80	D83D DE00	GRINNING FACE
❤	U+2764	E2 9D A4	2764	HEAVY RED HEART
🌍	U+1F30D	F0 9F 8C 8D	D83D DF0D	EARTH GLOBE EUROPE-AFRICA
🚀	U+1F680	F0 9F 9A 80	D83D DE80	ROCKET
✅	U+2705	E2 9C 85	2705	CHECK MARK
💡	U+1F4A1	F0 9F 92 A1	D83D DCA1	ELECTRIC LIGHT BULB

4-Byte UTF-8 Encoding

Emoji above U+FFFF follow the UTF-8 pattern for 4-byte sequences:

11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx

For U+1F600: binary 0001 1111 0110 0000 0000 → F0 9F 98 80

UTF-16 Surrogate Pairs

In JavaScript strings (which use UTF-16), emoji above U+FFFF are stored as two 16-bit code units called a surrogate pair:

• High surrogate: 0xD800–0xDBFF
• Low surrogate: 0xDC00–0xDFFF

This means "\ud83d\ude00".length === 2 in JavaScript, even though it represents a single visible character. The Unicode Inspector correctly counts such emoji as one code point while showing both UTF-16 units.

Emoji Sequences

Many modern emoji are composed of multiple code points joined by Zero Width Joiner (U+200D). For example, the family emoji is four person emoji joined by ZWJ characters. Variation selectors (U+FE0E, U+FE0F) control whether a character renders as text or emoji style. The Unicode Inspector reveals every component in such sequences.