Emojipedia Expands Into Stickers & Emotes
Today, on our twelfth annual World Emoji Day, Emojipedia is excited to unveil a new expansion into stickers and emotes.
Today, on our twelfth annual World Emoji Day, Emojipedia is excited to unveil a new expansion into stickers and emotes. While we'll remain the world's leading resource for Unicode-recommended emojis, this new image-based library marks a step toward embracing the broader landscape of digital pictographs, at a time when the distinction between emojis and stickers is more fluid than ever.
To access the new stickers and emotes library on Emojipedia, you can click here.
You can search through our archive of stickers and emotes to find concepts that go beyond the Unicode emoji keyboard, like "capybara":
Once you've found a sticker/emote you link, selecting it will take you to its individual item page. From here, you can copy the image to your clipboard or download it to your device, or use this as a starting point to generate your own new emoji-like sticker image.
🤔 Stickers? Emotes? How do they differ from emojis anyway?
Emojis are part of the Unicode Standard, and have been since 2010. That means they’re designed to work like letter characters across different devices and platforms; whether you’re on an iPhone, Android, or the web, you’ll still see a version of 😊 or 🌮 that’s recognizable (albeit with a different design depending on your device or the platform being used).
Stickers and emotes, on the other hand, don’t follow the same rules. They’re not part of Unicode, and until recently couldn't technically be placed in-line with text without the use of shortcodes, like MSN Messenger's old "graphic emoticons" or Slack's custom emoji upload feature.
Stickers are usually bigger, more detailed images that you can send in chats or place on photos, like the Emoji Kitchen, or the hottest app of 2016, Kim Kardashian's Kimoji app, or (again, until recently) Apple's Animoji and Memoji stickers.
Emotes, seen on platforms like Twitch or Discord, are custom icons or animations used to react quickly in chats.
In a nutshell, stickers and emotes are image files featuring expressions, people, animals, and more, used to communicate thoughts and feelings.
Conceptually, there has always been significant overlap with emojis—both in how they are used and in how loosely the term "emoji" has been applied to stickers and emotes over time.
Now, with iOS 18 allowing users to embed stickers (including Animoji, Memoji, Genmoji, and others) directly into text, the distinction between emojis, stickers, and emotes is becoming even more blurred for everyday users.
If you'd like to learn more about the distinctions and overlap between emojis, stickers, and emotes, check out the deep dive by our own David Doochin entitled "What Is An Emoji In 2025?"