Could you name your child using emoji? 🤔💭

There’s a folk law that states any headline ending in a question mark can be answered with “no”, so let’s get that out of the way up front: the answer here is “Maybe, I’m not a lawyer, but here’s what I know.”

Before we get into the nitty gritty of how to write an emoji name for human use, would it be legal? In the United States: probably. We’ve seen some weird baby names here including the infamous “Apple” and the more recent baby “Hashtag”. On top of that the US doesn’t have a baby name review process like some other countries, so it’s difficult to tell if anyone would take offense to attempting to name a child after a tiny pictograph like an emoji.

Now onto precedent: how are legal names that are Unicode emoji handled? So far as I could find, there’s only one company in the United States whose name is actually registered using Unicode emoji: 💾🌵, and on the topic of their name they have this to say:

💾🌵 is pronounced “disk cactus.” The company is registered as U+1F4BE U+1F355, LLC. To our knowledge, we are the first company with a native emoji name.

Those numbers and letters following the U+’s above denote Unicode code points, basically an alternate representation of Unicode graphemes (the basic unit of a written language, you might call it a letter). This isn’t just for emoji though, every letter you can type on a computer has a representation like this. For example the lowercase Latin letter “a” is equally represented by U+61. Likewise, in the example above U+1F4BE is the code point for 💾.

(Sidenote: 💾🌵 says on their website their name is on file “as U+1F4BE U+1F355, LLC”, but I believe that’s a typo, because that equates to “ 💾🍕, LLC”. The correct code point for 🌵 is U+1F335. I’ve let them know & will update if they get back to me.)

There’s the critically important fact that you can write out a Unicode representation by hand on a birth certificate, so that’s a win. Even further though, we can surmise that—based off of what’s been done for company legal names—if you did name your child an emoji symbol it’d probably be entered on file using the code point representation. This is feasible to type on old operating systems & can make it through older encoding systems (e.g. government software 🙄).

For the sake of argument, if you named a kid “🌈 Doe”, their legal name would probably be on file as “U+1F308 Doe” (e.g. on their birth certificate, Social Security card, etc.) for convenience of typing in emoji-unfriendly environments. This leads me to wonder, though, if a more common document used to verify identity or as a background check (like a driver’s license) would have to support emoji so you could perform these functions. If the emoji is properly displayed then a person could look at your ID and say “Oh this person’s name is 🌈 “Rainbow” Doe”, rather than the confusing situation of: “Oh, your name is ‘U-plus-one-F-three-zero-eight’?”

So, if Gwenyth Paltrow can name her kid “Apple”, you can surely name your kid “🍎”, right? But is that pronounced “red apple” or just “apple”? And what about “🍏” or ?

The simplest way to resolve the pronunciation problem would probably be to go along with the Unicode name for these symbols. So 🌈 would be “Rainbow”, while 🍎 is exactly “Red Apple” and 🍏 is “Green Apple”.  probably wouldn’t be an accepted name because it’s in the Private Use Area of Unicode encodings, meaning it’s not a universally supported character in the same way spoken language or emoji characters are.

This is just beginning of many potential problems of having a name that’s a single ambiguous pictograph — another big challenge to naming a person an emoji would be the significant communicative differences in proprietary depictions of the emoji. Should an emoji name be legal, would it be ethical or cruel? What do you think?

1. Thanks to Patrick Gilfether, whose Facebook post prompted this post.
2. So many great emojineering run downs over the years, but Mathias Bynens’ Javascript emoji post was an invaluable refresher for this post.
3. I think a lot of these are latent thoughts from this Vsauce video on names, if you haven’t seen it, you should give it a watch!