In most ways, the HAMBURGER emoji is quite boring. It’s been around since emoji’s Japanese heyday, when it appeared on phones from all of Japan’s big cellphone networks, and it was one of the first emoji to be adopted for use in the wider world.1 Early documents show that ‘🍔’ was intended to represent both hamburgers specifically (ハンバーガー, or hanbaagaa) and fast food in general (ファーストフード, or fuaasutofuudo)2 — although its modest place in the emoji rankings, coming in at only 355th most popular in 2021,3 suggests that neither sense is particularly compelling. To put it another way, and to see emoji’s very long tail in action, HAMBURGER is used 677 times less often than ‘😂’, the most common emoji.
Why, then, am I writing about ‘🍔’? Well, for two reasons.
First is because HAMBURGER provides an object lesson in how emoji are not really standardised, at least not in the way you might expect. Back in 2017, when Google refreshed the visual appearance of all its emoji, the slice of cheese on the ‘🍔’ somehow migrated from its rightful position atop the burger to under it,4 prompting not a little online surprise.5 Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who, it should be noted, earned $200,000,000 that same year,6 publicly promised to fix the position of the cheese on a pixelated hamburger:
Will drop everything else we are doing and address on Monday:) if folks can agree on the correct way to do this!
And indeed, Pichai was as good as his word. The cheese was soon restored.7
That “burgergate” had come about at all was because neither Google nor anyone else truly controls what emoji look like. The Unicode Consortium, which gives each emoji its unique name and number, provides examples of how each one should be designed, but it has no way to enforce those suggestions. This is why Facebook’s emoji can look subtly different to Microsoft’s, and Microsoft’s to Snapchat’s, and so on. And furthermore, this is why Google, the first big Western company to embrace emoji, can put the cheese in the wrong place in the ‘🍔’.
The second reason to take note of the burger emoji is because its mid-table position in the emoji hierarchy has a practical significance. The set of emoji we can use on our phones and computers isn’t fixed. The same Unicode Consortium which manages the emoji lexicon invites proposals for new symbols, and each year, a lucky few are given the official seal of approval. One of the criteria for deciding which new emoji to approve is their expected level of usage — and that is where HAMBURGER comes in. Although its popularity is little more than a rounding error when compared to the most common emoji, ‘🍔’ sits roughly at the midpoint, or median, of emoji popularity: about half of all emoji are more popular, and about half are less popular.8 HAMBURGER is a helpful, beefy barometer for how popular an emoji needs to be before Unicode’s emoji subcommittee will take it into consideration.
The humble ‘🍔’ has a lot to teach us about how emoji work.
- 1.
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Unicode. “Unicode 6.0.0”.
- 2.
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Scherer, Markus, Mark Davis, Kat Momoi, Darick Tong, Yasuo Kida, and Peter Edberg. “L2/10-132:/Emoji/Symbols:/Background/Data”. Unicode Consortium, April 2010.
- 3.
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Daniel, Jennifer. “Emoji Frequency”. Unicode.
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Felt, Doug. “Update Svgs to New Design. · Googlefonts Noto-emoji@f931bea”. GitHub.
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Shinal, John. “Google CEO Sundar Pichai Doubled His Pay Last Year to $200 Million”. CNBC.
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Ricker, Thomas. “Google CEO Makes Fixing Hamburger Emoji His Top Priority”. The Verge.
- 8.
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Davis, Mark. “L2/19-082:/QID/Emoji/Proposal”. Unicode Consortium, March 28, 2019.