# What authority assigns the "short" names of the Emoji?
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-authority-assigns-the-short-names-of-the-emoji/29665
**Category:** Site feedback
**Created:** [2015 年6 月 4 日 23:49 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-authority-assigns-the-short-names-of-the-emoji/29665 "2015-06-04T23:49:34Z")
**Posts on this page:** 15
**Page:** 1
### 作者：  [@elijah](https://meta.discourse.org/u/elijah)
#### 发布日期： [2015 年6 月 4 日 23:49 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-authority-assigns-the-short-names-of-the-emoji/29665/1 "2015-06-04T23:49:34Z")
Discourse uses things like :``fries: to include images like 🍟 (in place of, say 1F35F FRENCH FRIES 🍟). I gather the :name: string is called a “short code”, but what authority assigns those names? I don’t find it in any of the Unicode data dumps ( [Index of /Public/UNIDATA](http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/) )
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### 作者：  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### 发布日期： [2015 年6 月 5 日 00:05 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-authority-assigns-the-short-names-of-the-emoji/29665/2 "2015-06-05T00:05:36Z")
I don’t know that anyone is assigning short names.
But [per the Unicode spec](http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f35f/index.htm) the name is
> FRENCH FRIES
and the short word chosen is
> FRIES
So maybe de-facto…
1. If the Unicode name for the Emoji is a single word, use that word
2. If the Unicode name for the Emoji is multiple words, pick _one_ of those words
Which one, I can’t say.. it’s clear that `:french:` would be a bad choice here 😉
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### 作者：  [@elijah](https://meta.discourse.org/u/elijah)
#### 发布日期： [2015 年6 月 5 日 00:09 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-authority-assigns-the-short-names-of-the-emoji/29665/3 "2015-06-05T00:09:50Z")
Well **someone** decided that U+1F346 AUBERGINE should be called :`eggplant`: and not :`aubergine`:, so I don’t think it’s one of those two. (I came asking about :`fries`: because that’s another UK / US difference.)
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### 作者：  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### 发布日期： [2015 年6 月 5 日 00:14 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-authority-assigns-the-short-names-of-the-emoji/29665/4 "2015-06-05T00:14:49Z")
Well, the US is correct, I think you mean 😉
I’d expect there to be a Japanese bias due to the origin of Emoji. Perhaps Japanese people call eggplants Aubergines? Apparently Nasu (茄子 or ナス?) is the Japanese word for “eggplant”.. so I dunno.
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### 作者：  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### 发布日期： [2015 年6 月 5 日 02:49 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-authority-assigns-the-short-names-of-the-emoji/29665/5 "2015-06-05T02:49:25Z")
> [@elijah](#):
>
> someone decided
we should add an alias there, feel free to send a PR
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### 作者：  [@Mittineague](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Mittineague)
#### 发布日期： [2015 年6 月 5 日 02:55 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-authority-assigns-the-short-names-of-the-emoji/29665/6 "2015-06-05T02:55:41Z")
> [@codinghorror](#):
>
> Perhaps Japanese people call eggplants Aubergines
Seems it is a legitimate alternative name, though I sure never heard of it before
And it isn’t the Japanese, but the Brits! 🙀
> **[Eggplant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggplant)**
>
> Solanum ovigerum Dunal
> Solanum trongum Poir.
> and see text
> Eggplant (in North American, Australian, and Philippine English), aubergine (in British, Irish, and New Zealand English), brinjal (in Indian, Bangladeshi,\[citation needed\] Pakistani, Singapore, Malaysian,\[citation needed\] South African, and Sri Lankan English), or baigan (in Caribbean English)\[unreliable source?\] is a plant species in the nightshade family Solanaceae. Solanum melongena is grown worldwide for its edible fruit, typical...
Anyway, I thought the images were “mapped” so basically _any_ :word: could be used for any image.
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### 作者：  [@elijah](https://meta.discourse.org/u/elijah)
#### 发布日期： [2015 年6 月 5 日 04:04 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-authority-assigns-the-short-names-of-the-emoji/29665/7 "2015-06-05T04:04:22Z")
I put this in meta for a good reason. Did Discourse name them or did they come from somewhere else? What authority did Discourse go to? Did you keep records? There are a lot of sites that offer guides to emoji and include these names, but I thought since Discourse implemented them, someone here may have an official reference s/he consulted. If no one knows, I can go ask elsewhere.
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### 作者：  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### 发布日期： [2015 年6 月 5 日 04:05 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-authority-assigns-the-short-names-of-the-emoji/29665/8 "2015-06-05T04:05:32Z")
> [@elijah](#):
>
> someone here may have an official reference s/he consulted
The official ref is the filenames we got from emojione, twitter,google and github that extracted the images out of the apple emojis.
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### 作者：  [@elijah](https://meta.discourse.org/u/elijah)
#### 发布日期： [2015 年6 月 5 日 04:10 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-authority-assigns-the-short-names-of-the-emoji/29665/9 "2015-06-05T04:10:51Z")
From which I take it the “authority” is Apple or came through Apple. That is if everyone is using the same names from the same ultimate source.
It’s not the answer I was hoping to find, but if that’s it, I’ll have to accept it.
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### 作者：  [@Mittineague](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Mittineague)
#### 发布日期： [2015 年6 月 5 日 04:20 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-authority-assigns-the-short-names-of-the-emoji/29665/10 "2015-06-05T04:20:36Z")
With the modal selector knowing exact names isn’t really required.
True, it would be more convenient, but I doubt if members use more than a handful of them and they should get to know their favorites in short time no?
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### 作者：  [@elijah](https://meta.discourse.org/u/elijah)
#### 发布日期： [2015 年6 月 5 日 04:48 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-authority-assigns-the-short-names-of-the-emoji/29665/11 "2015-06-05T04:48:59Z")
I have built several Unicode tools for my own use. I wanted to extend my own tools with this functionality. The only way it affects Discourse is that I’m likely to be cutting and pasting the output into Discourse forums.
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### 作者：  [@downey](https://meta.discourse.org/u/downey)
#### 发布日期： [2015 年6 月 5 日 15:38 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-authority-assigns-the-short-names-of-the-emoji/29665/12 "2015-06-05T15:38:38Z")
> [@elijah](#):
>
> but what authority assigns those names?
The Unicode Technical Report process. UTR #51 is coordinated by Mark Davis at Google and Peter Edberg at Apple. Details on how to provide feedback is in the “Status” paragraph of the UTR:
> **[UTS #51: Unicode Emoji](http://unicode.org/reports/tr51/)**
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### 作者：  [@elijah](https://meta.discourse.org/u/elijah)
#### 发布日期： [2015 年6 月 5 日 18:16 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-authority-assigns-the-short-names-of-the-emoji/29665/13 "2015-06-05T18:16:30Z")
UTR#51 deals with emoji, but they don’t seem to deal with assigning short codes. It is merely vaguely touched on in the section on Input:
> **[6 Input - UTS #51: Unicode Emoji](http://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Input)**
>
> Emoji are not typically typed on a keyboard. Instead, they are generally picked from a palette, or recognized via a dictionary. The mobile keyboards typically have a button to select a palette of emoji, such as in the left image below. Clicking on...
> [@](#):
>
> In some input systems, a word or phrase bracketed by colons is used to explicitly pick emoji characters. Thus typing in “I saw an #x3a;ambulance:” is converted to “I saw an 🚑”. For completeness, such systems might support all of the full Unicode names, such as :first quarter moon with face: for 🌛. Spaces within the phrase may be represented by \_, as in the following:
>
> “my ⏰ didn’t work”
>
> →
>
> “my ⏰ didn’t work”.
>
> However, in general the full Unicode names are not especially suitable for that sort of use; they were designed to be unique identifiers, and tend to be overly long or confusing.
However while 🌛 works here: 🌛 other names like 🍟 do not.
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### 作者：  [@Mittineague](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Mittineague)
#### 发布日期： [2015 年6 月 5 日 21:15 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-authority-assigns-the-short-names-of-the-emoji/29665/14 "2015-06-05T21:15:11Z")
> [@elijah](#):
>
> other names like 🍟 do not.
Maybe your not thinking of Emoji, but unicode?
eg.
`🍟`
## 🍟
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### 作者：  [@elijah](https://meta.discourse.org/u/elijah)
#### 发布日期： [2015 年6 月 6 日 00:05 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-authority-assigns-the-short-names-of-the-emoji/29665/15 "2015-06-06T00:05:44Z")
The colorful images are replacements for Unicode characters, but both are emoji.
It is starting to look like the names have been arbitrarily assigned by contributors to gemoji, a tool which creates png images from the Apple truetype font (“/System/Library/Fonts/Apple Color Emoji.ttf”, not included in the package).
[https://github.com/github/gemoji](https://github.com/github/gemoji)