Searching for emojis in the composer no longer only understands English — the picker now matches keywords in 48 languages.
Until now, emoji search was English-only, regardless of your site’s locale. None of these searches worked:
joinha→
Geburtstag→
bisou→
corazón→
桜→
This has been a long-standing request from multilingual communities.
What’s new
We’ve updated Discourse to source emoji keyword aliases from several localization datasets and merge them per locale, so coverage is both broad (48 languages) and deep (multiple keywords per emoji in each language).
What changes for your community
- 48 locales now have localized emoji search keywords — up from zero.
- ~88,000 emoji-alias entries in total across those locales.
No setting to flip — once your site is on the latest Discourse, the emoji picker search will use each user’s interface locale automatically.
One more thing
While we were in here, we also trimmed ~160KB from the emoji picker’s payload, so it opens faster — especially noticeable on slower connections and mobile.