No doubt, you’re familiar with emoji, which run the gamut from faces to convey emotion 😆 😠 to animals 🐰 to objects 📖 to the infamous “pile of poo” 💩.
Emoji are challenging to type, so mostly we choose them from a palette. On recent versions of macOS, that’s found in the Edit menu under Emoji & Styles. On iPhones and iPads, there’s an emoji keyboard.
How to Type an Emoji / The Emoji Cheat Sheet
What if you want to type an emoji? Many emoji correspond to common words, such as “tea”, “sushi”, or “palm tree”. Enter the Emoji Cheat Sheet, a common method for typing emoji in numerous online apps using a simple pattern. Start with a colon, type the corresponding word, use underscore in place of space, and end with a colon. So that’s :tea:, :sushi:, and :palm_tree: (🍵, 🍣, and 🌴).
What if you’re in a desktop or mobile app and want to use the Emoji Cheat Sheet abbreviations to type an emoji? TextExpander is perfect for that:
Add the Emoji Cheat Sheet Group
Once you’ve added the Emoji Cheat Sheet group, you can type emoji using the cheat sheet abbreviations in any app on your Mac, PC, iPhone, or iPad.
Emoji Flags
We’ve taken this one step further with our Emoji Flags group:
It’s like the Emoji Cheat Sheet, but for country flags. The pattern is: colon, “flag”, dash, two letter country abbreviation (in lowercase), colon. For example, :flag-us:, :flag-kr:, and :flag-gh: for the US, South Korea, and Ghana (🇺🇸, 🇰🇷, 🇬🇭).
Emoji Resources
To search all emoji, including proposed future emoji, have a look at Emojipedia. For emoji news, follow @Emojipedia on Twitter, and check out the Emojipedia Blog by Jeremy Burge.
