Emoji Translator

Ask your mum what two crying faces and a skull mean and she'll assume somebody died. Ask anyone under 25 and they'll tell you it means "I'm laughing so hard I'm crying." This emoji translator sides with the under-25s, and that's exactly what it said when I tried it. Paste emoji in for words, or type words to get emoji.

What Do These Emoji Mean Online?

It's often not what the picture shows. Skull? Dying of laughter. Goat? Greatest of all time. A baseball cap? Somebody's lying, because cap is slang for a lie. I set the tool up to read them the way group chats do, not by the names on the Unicode chart.

Emoji	Official name	What people mean
💀	skull	I'm dying laughing
😭	loudly crying face	laughing hard, or overwhelmed
🔥	fire	amazing, hot
🐐	goat	greatest of all time
🧢	billed cap	that's a lie ("no cap" is the truth)
👀	eyes	I'm watching, this is interesting
💅	nail polish	unbothered, sassy
🙃	upside-down face	sarcasm, "great, just great"
🫡	saluting face	will do, respect
🥲	smiling face with tear	happy and sad at once
👍	thumbs up	okay (can read cold to younger people)
🙂	slightly smiling face	polite, sometimes passive-aggressive

That thumbs-up row starts real arguments. It even got to court. In 2023 a Saskatchewan judge decided a farmer's thumbs-up, sent back after a photo of a grain contract, was as good as his signature. Plenty of younger people still read a lone one as a sulk.

Words to Emoji, Emoji to Words

All real runs, copied out of the box.

What I typed	What came back
i love pizza	❤️ 🍕
happy birthday sam! party at 8pm	🎉 🎂 Sam! 🎉 8pm
that test was so hard i'm dead	📚 😩 💀
i'm going to sleep, good night	😴 🌙
lets go to the beach this weekend	🏖️ 🚗 📅
🍕🍺🏈📺	Pizza and beer while watching football on TV.
👀🔥🐐	That looks fire, it's the GOAT.

Those last two went the other way. There's no switch for that: feed it mostly emoji and you get words, feed it words and you get emoji.

Order matters, by the way. Pizza, arrow, house reads as "pizza, then home." House, pizza is a cosy night in. So the tool keeps your words in the order you typed them, even when a shuffle would look nicer.

The 8pm Clock Problem

The first version was a bit too keen. "party at 8pm" came out as 8️⃣🕗, a keycap eight and a clock face. Cute, but your friends now have to decode the time of your own party. Times, dates and numbers stay as plain text now, and names too, so Sam stays Sam and nobody shows up at the wrong hour because they misread a tiny clock face on a cracked phone screen.

It also got lazy with the beach weekend early on, ending in 📅🕒, a calendar plus a random 3 o'clock. Neither was wrong, exactly. Neither helped. Now it's 🏖️ 🚗 📅. Beach, drive, weekend. Fine. I ran the same test lines again after every change to the prompt, party invite included, since fixing the clock and then quietly breaking the beach trip would have been a very silly way to spend a morning.

And the one rule I wrote before anything else: no fruit or veg with a double meaning. Nobody needs a peach where a peach doesn't belong, least of all from a free website.

Where I'd Use It, and Where I Wouldn't

Birthday texts. Sports chats. That reply you send when words won't come but you want them to know you saw it. Decoding is the bigger win, honestly: paste in that baffling string your teenager sent and see what it most likely means before you reply with something embarrassing.

I'd never send times or addresses this way. A clock and an office block is how somebody ends up at the wrong building at the wrong hour. And an emoji-only apology? Say sorry in words first. Add the smiling-tear one after.

How Emoji Started

A Japanese designer named Shigetaka Kurita drew the first big set in 1999: 176 tiny pictures, each 12 by 12 pixels, for a mobile internet service run by NTT Docomo. In 2016 New York's Museum of Modern Art added them to its collection, and next to the thousands of detailed faces on a phone today those 176 tiny drawings look almost comically plain, like a toddler's sketch of a smile. A year earlier, Oxford Dictionaries had picked 😂 as its word of the year, which annoyed a fair few word nerds. New ones still get approved every year by the Unicode Consortium, and you can read the history on Wikipedia's emoji page.

Speaking in slang instead of pictures? The Gen Alpha Translator handles skibidi and rizz. The Boomer Translator covers the other end, ellipses and all. More are on the translators page.

Emoji Questions

What does the skull emoji mean in a text? Dead, as in that joke killed me. Nobody's actually hurt, though try telling that to a worried dad who just spotted one under the family photo.

What does the crying emoji mean from a guy or a girl? Usually "that's hilarious" or "that's too cute." Sad tears more often get the single-tear face, but read the room.

Can you translate emoji to English? Yep, paste the row. You'll get one plain sentence back, read left to right, roughly how your cousin meant it.

How do I turn text into emoji? Type it, hit translate. Each idea gets one to three emoji, while names and times stay as words, so the party doesn't drift to 9.

Why do emoji look different on iPhone and Android? Every company draws its own set. One phone's grimace can be another phone's grin, so check twice when it counts.