did you know some emojis are just sums of other emojis?
❤️ + 🔥 = ❤️🔥
It might seem simple, but behind that burning heart emoji, there’s a super interesting tech trick.
Hello world, my name is Francisco, fcoterroba on the internet, and today I want to dive deeper into a video I just uploaded to TikTok about how emojis aren’t always what they seem.
what is the Zero Width Joiner (ZWJ)?
For two emojis to “merge” into one, we need a special glue. In computing, this glue is called the Zero Width Joiner (or ZWJ for short).
It’s an invisible character (Unicode U+200D) that tells the device: “hey, don’t render these two emojis separately, join them and see if there’s a combined version.”
examples of emoji “sums”
I’m sure you’ve used them a thousand times without knowing they were a sum:
- heart on fire: ❤️ + [ZWJ] + 🔥 = ❤️🔥
- families: 👨 + [ZWJ] + 👩 + [ZWJ] + 👧 = 👨👩👧
- professions: 👩 + [ZWJ] + 💻 = 👩💻 (woman technologist)
- hair colors: 👨 + [ZWJ] + 🦰 = 👨🦰 (man with red hair)
If your phone or computer is old and doesn’t recognize the combination, you’ll simply see the emojis separately. This is what we call an elegant fallback.
why is it done this way?
Imagine if for every family combination, every skin tone, and every profession, we had to create a unique code in the Unicode standard. It would be infinite!
By using sums, the standard stays lightweight and allows for enormous flexibility. It’s basically programming applied to font design.
I hope that from now on, when you send a ❤️🔥, you see the “sum” behind it. Don’t forget to follow me on my social media for more tech curiosities. See you in the next post!