Emoji quiz

Every riddle is a short row of pictures, read from left to right as the words of one answer. A line above it gives the riddle's number, topic and level. A typed answer is compared with every accepted form, while a tapped choice is settled at once. Then the answer appears, with a note on how the pictures read and any alternatives that would also have counted.

Each riddle in the game shows 2 to 8 pictures that together spell out a film, a song, a saying, a word, a place, or a book or tale. You can type the answer or choose from four options: the right one and three more drawn from the same topic. Typing allows three tries and up to two hints per riddle, each given on request: first a blank for every letter, then the first letter of each word. A riddle found unaided counts as solved alone, one found after a hint as helped, and the rest as not solved. Show the answer ends a riddle at any time as not solved. Picking is one tap, so it offers no hints.

The daily quiz deals ten riddles in a fixed order: three easy, then four medium, then three hard. Everyone playing in English on the same calendar day gets the same riddles and the same four options, and a new set starts at midnight on the device's own clock. Sets are numbered from the first, played on 14 October 2026.

No riddle returns until every other riddle of its level has been dealt. The 75 easy riddles take 25 days to go round, the 98 medium ones 24 and the 70 hard ones 23, and none appears on two days running. Only the first finished game of a day is recorded; a replay is played but not counted.

An answer of up to 4 letters must be spelt exactly, and longer ones forgive more. Capitals, accents, punctuation and spaces never matter, nor does a leading "the", "a" or "an". A typo is a missing, extra or wrong letter, or two neighbouring letters swapped.

So "ubtterfly" is accepted for Butterfly. A guess up to two typos further off, provided no more than a quarter of its letters are wrong, brings the message "Almost: check the spelling. That try did not count." That try is free. Anything further away uses up a try, and after the last wrong one the game reveals the answer.

Most emoji riddles rest on one of three tricks. A picture can stand for a whole word, two pictures can join into a compound word, or a sound-alike picture can match the answer only when said aloud. The five examples below are never dealt in a game, so reading them spoils nothing.

• 🧈🪰 reads as Butterfly: butter + fly: two pictures make one word. This is the simplest emoji rebus.
• 🌧️🐈🐕 gives the saying "It's raining cats and dogs": rain + cats + dogs: raining very heavily. The small words are left for the reader, as idioms usually need.
• 🦁👑 is the film The Lion King: lion + king (the crown). Pictures may hint at an idea rather than name it.
• 🧊🏞️ is the place Iceland: ice + land. Only the meaning of the landscape counts.
• ✨✨🤏⭐ is the nursery rhyme Twinkle Twinkle Little Star: twinkle, twinkle (sparkles) + little + star. A repeated picture repeats a word.

Asked for help, the game first shows The Lion King as "___ ____ ____", then as "T__ L___ K___". Harder riddles often lean on sound: an eye means "I", and a bee means "be".

The English set holds 243 riddles in six topics, 40 to 41 in each. All were written for this site in British English, and each explains how it reads.

Practice takes any mix of topics and deals 10, 20 or all of their riddles at random, easier ones first. For countries named from their flags instead, the flag quiz covers every one.

Yes, in all but the pictures it uses. Cambridge Dictionary defines a rebus as pictures, and sometimes letters or symbols, that together represent a word or phrase. An emoji riddle swaps drawings for the pictograms of a phone keyboard.

The rebus puzzle was a pastime long before phones. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds "The Answer. An hieroglyphic poetical epistle", a London print first published by Laurie & Whittle in 1799. It is a love letter in hand-coloured pictures mixed with words and letters. According to the museum, such rebuses were used for parlour games from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.

Westminster Abbey shows an older one. The chapel of John Islip, abbot in the early sixteenth century, is carved with his rebus: an eye and a slip, or branch, which together say I-slip.

Every emoji in the game is drawn from a bundled image, so a riddle looks the same on any phone or computer. The Unicode Consortium encodes emoji by their general appearance, not their meaning, and has no control over how each platform draws them.

Those drawings change how a picture is read. In a 2016 study, Miller and colleagues showed people 22 emoji as drawn by 5 platforms. Rating the very same picture, they still disagreed on whether it was positive, neutral or negative 25% of the time.

The game uses Twemoji, release 17.0.3, under the CC BY 4.0 licence: 1,914 images, every emoji without a skin tone variant. Unicode 18.0, released on 16 September 2026, counts 3,972 emoji once skin tones are included. In a home-built quiz, an emoji without an image here, such as a skin tone or one newer than the set, shows as the device draws it.

To a screen reader, each row is one image labelled with the emoji themselves, so their names are read out and the riddle arrives in words. The RNIB's guide to accessible social media notes that screen reader users hear the full name of every emoji.

Each answer is revealed as soon as its riddle is settled, and the result lists them all again. It counts riddles solved alone, helped and not solved, and draws a row of squares: 🟩 green, 🟨 yellow and 🟥 red.

Copy the result copies the set number, the squares, the score and the page link, ready for a group chat. Statistics of the daily sets stay on this device, per language: sets played, days in a row, the best score and the average share solved. They sit in the browser's local storage under emoji-riddle-quiz-results, and nothing is sent anywhere.

Print prints the daily ten, a practice draw, a quiz from the maker or a finished round. The printable page has numbered emoji rows, each with a space to write on, plus a name line. The answer sheet, explanations included, follows on a second page so it can be kept back. That suits a classroom worksheet, a family game at the table or a pub quiz round.

Make a quiz opens a maker for up to 30 riddles under an optional title. Each takes up to 12 emoji, an answer of up to 80 characters and up to three alternatives, separated by "/". Emoji can be typed or picked from the bundled images, sorted into nine groups.

Play it starts the quiz, Copy the link gives a link to send, and Print makes the same two-page sheet. The riddles travel in the link after the # sign, a part of a web address browsers never send to a server, so the site keeps none of them. A received quiz can be played or edited as a copy.

A quiz master can write a round about a team, a class topic or a birthday, for team building or as an icebreaker. For a party game played out loud, the who is most likely to game runs from one phone passed round the room.

The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary traces the Japanese word emoji to e, picture, and moji, letter or character. It defines an emoji as a small digital image used to express an idea or emotion. The Unicode Consortium separates them from emoticons, which began as typed sequences such as :-) for a smile.

Shigetaka Kurita drew 176 emoji in 1999, each on a grid of 12 by 12 pixels. The Museum of Modern Art added the set to its collection in 2016. Unicode 6.0, released on 11 October 2010, added emoji in bulk, so they could travel between phones of different makers.

By 2015 they had reached everyday writing. Oxford University Press made the emoji 😂, face with tears of joy, its Word of the Year. Its research found that it made up 20% of the emoji used in the UK and 17% in the US.