Keyword clues

Why this is harder than it looks

Every emoji in the Unicode standard ships with a CLDR keyword list — the search terms your phone actually matches when you type "laughing" and 😂 shows up before you finish the word. This game reads that same list and throws out anything that shares a root with the emoji's real name before dealing you three. Ask for grinning face's clues and "grin" and "grinning" are gone; you're left holding "cheerful," "teeth," "nice" — which, fair warning, also fits about six other members of the smiling family.

The six-emoji lineup below leans on the same category tree as the rest of this site, so the decoys usually share a neighborhood with the real answer instead of standing out for free. Guess right and the streak keeps climbing; guess wrong and the run ends with a link to whatever you missed, so you can go read its actual keyword list and feel the betrayal firsthand. Best run sticks to this browser.