Type emojis, emoticons and smileys on your PC

Emojis are graphical representation of facial expressions, objects, places, weather, animals, etc. Similarly, smileys represents graphical smiling faces. Emoticons is a combination of ’emotions’ and ‘icons’ i.e. representing emotions graphically. Apart from these, there are many other symbols which you can use to represent your mood or activities you are doing. For example a vehicle may represent your present mode of driving. People across the globe, use them in text messages, web pages, promotional videos, promotional graphics, etc. Do you need to express yourself in the language of small pictorial figures? Then certainly you should know the method of how to type smileys, emojis, emoticons and other symbols on your computer. Also, you must know how to create an emoji yourself (described later in this article). It will be helpful if you cannot find a satisfactory expressive emoji.

You can type them in a word processing software such as Microsoft Word, WordPad. Also you can include them on your HTML web pages.

Let us check out few methods to easily type emojis, emoticons, smileys and other symbols. Let us use a word processor software for typing, for example, Microsoft Word in following ways:

A. Type Basic Smileys:

You can type smileys by typing punctuation marks, numbers and letters. You must type them in a particular sequence as shown in few examples below :

If you type, colon viz. : and small closing bracket viz. ) together, it will turn into ? smiley.

Similarly, if you type, colon : and small opening bracket ( together, it will turn into ☹ smiley.

Similarly, typing semicolon ; and small closing bracket ) turns into ? smiley.

Likewise, try few other combinations too which may appear to be a face when seen from 90 degree angle or right angle.

These type of emojis are very basic and certainly too limited. But this may be the fastest way to insert an smiley in your text.

B. Type using Windows Emoji Keyboard

You can invoke emoji keyboard on Windows Operating System by pressing Windows Key + . (period) or Windows + ;  (semicolon). The same is shown by using a keyboard image:

You can use these keys on your physical keyboard for the same.

Pressing one of the key combination (Win & . or Win & ; ) together will invoke built-in Windows emoji keyboard as shown in below image:

In the above keyboard, you can click on the tabs representing category of emojis. The keyboard will display collection of that category of emojis. For e.g. smiley faces & animals, people, celebrations & objects, food & plants, transportation & places and symbols. You can press “Tab” key on your keyboard to switch between these categories. The above image also represents the categories of emojis and symbols marked with serial no. 1-8.

You can also use “Search” tab to type in a keyword to search for a particular emoji. For example, place the cursor where you want to type an emoji. Open the emoji keyboard. Start typing the keyword. The particular emoji will be displayed on the emoji keyboard as shown in below image as an illustration:

Click on the emoji or press “Enter” key. The emoji will be inserted at the location of cursor. The same is shown in the below image as an illustration:

The emoji keyboard also displays the “Most recently used” emojis for instant insertion of frequently typed emojis.

New emojis, smileys, emoticons and symbols are added to this keyboard with window updates. There are many emojis in each category. You can use all those which you require. If you want even more, check out next method below.

C. Using Unicode code number to type emoji

This method can be used to type in a vast number of emojis. Far a greater number of emojis than mentioned in above two methods. The list is exhaustive with thousands of emojis, emoticons or symbols being developed continuously. These emoji characters are provided and developed on Unicode. Unicode is the universal character encoding, maintained by the Unicode Consortium. This encoding standard provides the basis for processing, storage and interchange of text data in any language. Most importantly, in all modern software and information technology protocols.

You can insert an emoji by typing in the emoji code followed by ALT+X on an word processing software. The same is represented in below keyboard image:

For example, type 1F600 followed by ALT+X will turn into ? emoticon. Here, ‘1F600’ is the Unicode reference code for this emoji.

Type 1F61B followed by ALT+X will turn into ? emoticon

1F4A3 followed by ALT+X will turn into ? symbol

Now you must be wondering where to get the Unicode reference codes for various emojis, emoticons and other symbols. Check out the comprehensive list of Unicode Emoji characters to find the code of a large number of emojis, emoticons and symbols. Open the link above and check out the Unicode code mentioned under the “code” column of the given table.

You can search for a particular emoji using web page search by pressing CTRL + F. Open web page search on your browser. Type in the keywords which you wan to search an emoji for. Read the code associated with the particular emoji which you want to use.

The code will be in the format U+XXXXX. The characters mentioned by XXXXX can be either four or five characters. While typing in Microsoft Word, you can omit “U+” or may type along with “U+”. Both the options display same emojis.

Clicking on the Smiley image under the “sample” column will navigate to the detailed list of the Unicode emoji characters and sequences, with images from different vendors, CLDR name, date, source, and keywords. This list will display the sample’s view on Browser, Apple, Google, Facebook, Windows, Twitter, etc.

D. Create your own emoji, smiley or emoticon

Still did not find the best emoji to type and use by using methods mentioned above? Then Go ahead with creating your own emoji. Few self created emojis are shown below as an illustration:

 

Finally, if you would like to burst out the creative bubble in you try creating your own emoji in Microsoft Window’s 3D Paint Application. You can use ‘sphere’ and other shapes from 3D shapes and then pasting ‘stickers’ on those shapes to create your own graphical expressions. Rotate them using 3D axes to give them final expression touch. Watch out the short video below: