Combining Enclosing Keycap
The Combining Enclosing Keycap (U+20E3) encloses a base character in a box to look like a keyboard key, e.g., 1️⃣, *️⃣, #️⃣.
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Regional Indicator
Regional indicators are used to encode ISO 3166-1 two-letter country/region codes. Two letters combine to produce flag emoji, such as 🇨🇳 (CN) and 🇺🇸 (US).
Skin Tone Modifier
Skin tone modifiers are combining characters used to modify the skin tone of human emoji. When combined with supported human emoji, they produce emoji with skin tones, e.g., 👋🏻, 👍🏿.
Tag Latin Small Letter
Tag Latin Small Letters were originally used for plain text language tags (now deprecated), and are now primarily used for emoji tag sequences (ETS). Using a black flag 🏴 as the base character, followed by tag letters spelling a subregion code (e.g., gbeng), and terminated by CANCEL TAG (U+E007F), regional flags can be generated, such as 🏴 (England).
Variation Selector
Variation Selectors are control characters that specify the display style of a character. For emoji, VS-15 (U+FE0E) forces text style (black-and-white), while VS-16 (U+FE0F) forces emoji style (color). For example, ♥ + U+FE0F = ❤️, resolving rendering differences of the same character in different environments.
Zero Width Joiner
Zero Width Joiner is a Unicode control character that takes up no width, used to join multiple individual characters into a single composite glyph. In emoji, it is the core "glue" for building ZWJ sequences, combining multiple emoji into compound ones, such as 🫱🫲 (handshake), 👨💻 (technologist), 🏳️🌈 (rainbow flag). If a platform does not support the sequence, it may fall back to displaying the individual characters separately.