emojis-categorised

All emojis, grouped by category, with human-readable labels. A tiny, zero-dependency dataset for building emoji pickers, autocompletes, and anywhere you need emojis organised into categories.

• 🗂️ Ready-to-use categories — emojis come grouped under readable names like "Smileys & People" and "Food & Drink". No numeric Unicode group IDs to map yourself.
• 📇 Human-readable labels — every emoji has a title-cased name ("Grinning Face"), handy for search and accessibility.
• 🌐 Complete & current — the full Unicode 17.0 base set (1916 emojis), generated straight from the official Unicode data.
• 📦 Zero dependencies, TypeScript types included, ships ESM + CommonJS.
• 🔎 Built-in search(), a flat list, and per-category helpers.

Install

npm install emojis-categorised

Quick start

// ESM
import { emojis } from 'emojis-categorised';

// CommonJS
const { emojis } = require('emojis-categorised');

emojis['Smileys & People'][0]; // { text: '😀', label: 'Grinning Face' }
Object.keys(emojis);           // ['Smileys & People', 'Animals & Nature', ...]

That's it — the emojis are already categorised. Compare that with generic Unicode datasets, where you have to map numeric group IDs to category names before you can render anything.

API

import { emojis, categories, list, getCategory, search } from 'emojis-categorised';

| Export | Type | Description | | --------------------- | --------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------- | | emojis | Record<Category, Emoji[]> | Every emoji grouped by category. | | categories | Category[] | The category names, in display order. | | list | CategorizedEmoji[] | Flat list of all emojis, each tagged with its category. | | getCategory(name) | (string) => Emoji[] | All emojis in a category ([] if unknown). | | search(query) | (string) => CategorizedEmoji[] | Case-insensitive match over labels. |

search('heart').slice(0, 3);
// [ { category: 'Smileys & People', text: '❤️', label: 'Red Heart' }, ... ]

getCategory('Food & Drink').length; // 131
list.length;                        // 1916

Where Emoji is { text: string; label: string }.

Data structure

{
  "Smileys & People": [
    { "text": "😀", "label": "Grinning Face" },
    { "text": "😃", "label": "Grinning Face with Big Eyes" }
  ],
  "Animals & Nature": [ /* … */ ],
  "Food & Drink":     [ /* … */ ],
  "Activity":         [ /* … */ ],
  "Travel & Places":  [ /* … */ ],
  "Objects":          [ /* … */ ],
  "Symbols":          [ /* … */ ],
  "Flags":            [ /* … */ ]
}

You can also import the raw JSON directly:

import emojis from 'emojis-categorised/emojis.json';

Categories

| Category | Count | | ----------------- | ----- | | Smileys & People | 559 | | Animals & Nature | 160 | | Food & Drink | 131 | | Activity | 85 | | Travel & Places | 219 | | Objects | 266 | | Symbols | 224 | | Flags | 272 |

Skin-tone and hair-colour variants are intentionally excluded, so the list is one clean entry per distinct emoji.

Example: a category-tabbed picker

import { categories, emojis } from 'emojis-categorised';

function EmojiPicker({ onPick }) {
  return categories.map((category) => (
    <section key={category}>
      <h3>{category}</h3>
      {emojis[category].map((e) => (
        <button key={e.text} title={e.label} onClick={() => onPick(e.text)}>
          {e.text}
        </button>
      ))}
    </section>
  ));
}

Regenerating the data

The dataset is generated from emoji-test.txt (bundled from unicode.org):

npm run build   # regenerates emojis.json, index.js and index.mjs
npm test        # validates structure, exports, and checks for duplicates

To move to a newer Unicode version, replace emoji-test.txt with the latest from https://unicode.org/Public/emoji/latest/emoji-test.txt and re-run the build. Existing labels are preserved; only new emojis get an auto-generated, title-cased label.

License

ISC © Maksym Dolynchuk