Objects Emojis

267 emojis in this category. The Objects category is where emoji go to become something they were never designed to be. 🔫 started as a realistic handgun. Apple replaced it with a green water pistol in iOS 10 (August 2016) without explanation. Google, Samsung, Facebook, and Twitter followed by 2018. Then in 2024, Elon Musk's X reverted it to a realistic M1911 semi-automatic. The gun emoji is now a water toy on every platform except X, where it's a weapon again. One Unicode codepoint, two completely different objects.

This is the biggest grab-bag category, with 140+ emojis covering clothing, music instruments, electronics, office supplies, tools, medical equipment, and furniture. 💀 Skull quietly became one of the most-used emojis in the entire Unicode set after Gen Z adopted it as a laughter replacement. Where millennials typed 😂, zoomers type 💀. One skull means "that's funny." Three skulls (💀💀💀) means you physically cannot breathe. A 2024 academic paper studied this shift, noting the skull functions as both a tone tag and punctuation in Gen Z internet slang. 🗿 Moai followed a similar trajectory, going from ignored statue to deadpan meme staple after Instagram shitposters adopted it in late 2018. It's now shorthand for dry sarcasm and "sigma" energy on TikTok.

Several objects in this category are technological fossils. 💾 Floppy Disk represents a storage format from the 1980s that Gen Z has never touched, yet they recognize it as the universal "save" icon. Some younger users report seeing it as a vending machine slot rather than a magnetic disk. 📟 Pager, 📠 Fax Machine, and 📼 Videocassette are all functional emoji for objects that stopped being manufactured decades ago. Apple redesigned 💉 Syringe during the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in early 2021, removing the blood to make it more appropriate for vaccination discussions. The change shipped in iOS 14.5, and usage of the syringe emoji skyrocketed alongside tweets containing "Pfizer," "vaccine," and "COVID."