Guess the Emoji

What is Guess the Emoji?

You are given a word or a phrase, and a grid of emoji. Pick the ones that say it. Sometimes it is a single object, often it is an idiom rendered far too literally: a piece of cake is a slice of cake and someone walking, and raining cats and dogs is exactly what it sounds like. The joke only works once you see it, which is why it is satisfying.

What the game actually tests is a specific kind of lateral thinking. You are decoding pictograms into a phrase, which means you have to hold two readings at once: what each symbol literally shows, and what the combination sounds like when spoken. That is closer to solving a rebus than to a vocabulary quiz, and it is why people who are excellent at crosswords sometimes stall on the easy ones.

How to play

1. Read the phrase at the top.
2. Tap the emoji from the grid that spell it out. Most answers need two.
3. Tapped the wrong one? Tap the slot to send it back.
4. The answer checks itself once every slot is full. Order does not matter.
5. Three lives per run. A hint costs points, a skip moves on.

Tips for getting more of them

• Count the slots first. Two slots means two emoji, so a five word idiom is being carried by two symbols and you are looking for the two that matter most.
• Say it out loud. Many answers are phonetic rather than literal, so the emoji stands for a sound as much as a thing.
• Find the odd noun. In an idiom, the concrete objects are what get drawn. In raining cats and dogs, the rain is optional but the animals are not.
• Ignore the near misses. The grid deliberately holds emoji that almost fit, and picking one costs a life.
• Use a hint early rather than late. One correct emoji usually makes the second obvious, and it costs fewer points than a wasted life.

Difficulty and scoring

There are three tiers and a mixed mode. Easy is single objects and simple pairs, things like a rainbow, a rocket, or a dog with a bone. Medium is idioms and sayings, which is where the game gets interesting. Hard is compound words and wordplay, where two symbols combine into a single term rather than describing one.

Each puzzle is worth ten points, dropping to six with one hint and two with two, so guessing well is worth far more than guessing often. You get three lives per run, and a wrong answer costs one. Your best score is stored in your browser rather than on a server.

A short history of emoji puzzles

The format descends from the rebus, a puzzle style that goes back centuries in which pictures stand in for syllables and words. Emoji simply gave the rebus a universal, standardised set of pictures for the first time, which is why these puzzles travel across languages far better than crosswords do.

Emoji themselves began in Japan in the late 1990s, designed for a mobile network's pager service, and were adopted into Unicode in 2010. That standardisation is the reason a puzzle written here renders the same on your phone as it does on someone else's on the other side of the world, and it is the whole reason this genre of puzzle exists at all.