Smiley Emoji Copy and Paste - 270+ Smiley Face Emojis
Copy and paste smiley face emojis, people emojis, and expressions. Click any smiley to copy it instantly for Instagram, TikTok, Discord, and more.
Smileys & People (272)
Total emojis: 272
How to Copy Smileys & People Emojis
- Browse the smileys & people emojis above
- Click any emoji to instantly copy it to your clipboard
- Paste with Ctrl+V (Windows) or Cmd+V (Mac) anywhere you want
These emojis work on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter/X, Discord, Facebook, WhatsApp, and most other platforms.
About Smiley & People Emojis
Smiley face emojis are the original emojis. The earliest set of 176 emojis was created in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita for Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo, and the first batch heavily favoured facial expressions because they did the most work in tiny mobile messages. When the Unicode Consortium absorbed emoji into the standard in 2010 (Unicode 6.0), smiley faces formed the core of the new "Emoticons" block at U+1F600–U+1F64F. The set has expanded with almost every Unicode release since — Unicode 9.0 added 🤣 and 🤩, Unicode 10.0 brought 🤯 and 🥵, and Unicode 13.0 added the much-loved 🥲 (Smiling Face with Tear). Today there are over 270 smiley and people emojis in the Unicode standard.
Most popular smiley emojis
- 😂 Face with Tears of Joy — consistently the most-used emoji on Twitter/X and Oxford Dictionaries' 2015 "Word of the Year".
- ❤️ paired with 😊 Smiling Face with Smiling Eyes — the workhorse of warm replies.
- 🥰 Smiling Face with Hearts — affection without committing to romance.
- 😭 Loudly Crying Face — almost always used ironically to mean "this is too much" rather than literal sadness.
- 🤔 Thinking Face — the universal "hmm" reaction, popular in Twitter quote-tweets.
- 💀 Skull — Gen Z's preferred "I'm dead" replacement for 😂.
- 🥺 Pleading Face — introduced in 2018 and immediately adopted as the begging emoji.
Where people use them
Smileys dominate Instagram captions and DMs, where soft expressions like 🥹 and 😌 set the tone. On TikTok, ironic uses of 💀 and 😭 punctuate captions and comments. WhatsApp is where 👍 and 😂 do the most volume globally — Meta's annual report routinely puts 😂 in the top three across the platform. Discord users gravitate toward more chaotic faces (🤡, 😈, 🤓) and custom server reactions built from them.
Platform rendering differences
The same Unicode code point looks different on every platform: Apple's designs are glossy with soft gradients, Google's are flat and geometric (since the 2017 redesign), Microsoft's are 3D-rendered, and Samsung's One UI emojis sit somewhere between Apple and Google. The infamous 🥲 (Smiling Face with Tear) and 🥹 (Face Holding Back Tears) look noticeably different across vendors — Apple's are more expressive, Microsoft's flatter. The meaning is the same, but the emotional weight can shift slightly.
Looking for non-emoji facial expressions? See our Lenny faces and kawaii emoticons collection for ASCII-style faces that work in usernames and places emojis don't.