Hanmoji: What Chinese characters and emoji reveal about each other

Abstract

Chinese characters predate the introduction of digital emoji by approximately 3,000 years. Despite the temporal gap, there are striking parallels between the canonical set of Chinese radicals and the set of emoji that have currently been approved by the Unicode Consortium. Comparing the 214 Kangxi Chinese radicals with the 3,019 emojis in the Unicode 12.0 set can reveal semantic gaps and provide directions for new emoji. Our analysis found that 72.4% of radicals have reasonable emoji equivalents, while only 17.8% of radicals lack any emoji equivalent that we could determine.