Most commonly-used emoji are encoded in the Unicode standard for indexing characters3. There are currently 1,282 emoji in the Unicode standard, and for each of these, the Unicode Consortium provides a code and name (e.g., U+1F600 for “grinning face”) but not the actual graphic. This is the same as is the case for Unicode text characters: for example, the Unicode character U+0041 indexes the Latin capital letter ‘A’, but it does not indicate specifically how the ‘A’ should look. Instead, a font renders the Unicode characters a particular way: the appearance of this text that you are reading is dictated by the Times New Roman font. Similarly, individual platform vendors such as Apple and Google create their own rendering for each emoji character they support. This means that the “Grinning Face” emoji character has a different appearance when viewed on an Apple device (e.g., an iPhone) than on a Google device (e.g., a Nexus phone). This is just one example of two different platform renderings; there are many platforms that each have their own unique set of emoji renderings. Emojipedia—a website serving as an “encyclopedia for emoji”—lists 17 such platforms4, which means that there may be at least 17 different renderings for a given Unicode emoji character.