I recently spent some time choosing the Emoji that I think best represents each US state (limiting my options to what appears in the Unicode Library) and I made a game where you can try to match them up.
If you need a refresher on the US states, here they are ordered by west to east:
Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Mississippi, Illinois, Michigan, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Indiana, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, South Carolina, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Maine.
🚨 Spoilers below 🚨
There are a few state Emojis that I’m not fully satisfied with. I assigned Mississippi a yam in honor of southern cooking, but that’s only after I realized there was no emoji for a river. Anybody can propose a new emoji to Unicode (guidelines here) and I found a compelling proposal for the addition of a river emoji by a man named Charles from New Jersey written in 2019. As Unicode outlines, a proposal can be rejected on any number of grounds including being too specific, open ended, or transient. I admire Charles’ earnest attempt to defend the importance of rivers to Unicode. As to whether rivers are a transient fad, he writes:
“RIVERs have flowed for eons—the earliest human civilizations were settled alongside them—and they are still used for trade, agriculture, travel, and hydropower to this day. They are not going anywhere—except the ocean!”
He also slips a little manifesto into the middle of his proposal, noting that there are far too few non-living Emojis in the Animals & Nature category and that including a river could be the beginning of a renaissance of geographic vocabulary. Reading this I realized that he was right - I had looked for a glacier to represent Montana and a geyser for Wyoming to no avail.
While there are certainly many bison in North Dakota (and the animal was featured on their 2006 state quarter), I wasn’t completely satisfied with this choice, as the bison could also easily represent Montana, South Dakota, or Nebraska. I think the most iconic emoji for North Dakota would have been an ushanka (Russian furry hat) as featured in the movie Fargo. Slack features this in their custom Emoji hall of fame but nevertheless it hasn’t been taken up by Unicode.
One interesting thing about Emojis is that each platform gets to stylize the Emoji their own way. Oftentimes, the changes are superficial but there have been some instances where design choices can lead to big miscommunications. Take the pistol Emoji, for example. Apple was the first company to stylize this Emoji as a squirt gun in 2016, but for a few years before squirt guns became the industry standard, I could have sent my dad PERSON + PISTOL (🧑🔫) from my iPhone and on his Android it would have looked to him like I was shooting him with an actual gun.
There was one instance in my state Emoji search where the platform impacted the Emoji I chose. Most of us will recognize the “Male Singer” emoji to be stylized after David Bowie. However, on Whatsapp he looks like Prince. So while I think the canoe does a fine job representing Minnesota, if I made this game on Whatsapp, Minnesota would have surely been represented by the male singer!
There’s a few other Emojis that I don’t expect most USians to immediately get. Personally, I didn’t know that Arkansas was the Gem State (and home to the only diamond mines in the US) nor did I know that the football hall of fame was in Ohio. Alabama getting a bus to commemorate Rosa Parks’ bus boycott and Delaware getting flying money to commemorate its status as a tax haven may seem a bit of a stretch. Virginia being for Lovers, Oklahoma being the Sooner State and Big Sky Montana all rely on recognizing somewhat obscure mottos. And I imagine many people will assign Texas the cowboy before (hopefully) realizing that Texas is also the Lone Star state, and Wyoming is home to significant cowboy culture. Finally, as a New Englander, I sort of hate to assign the moai Easter Island to Mount Rushmore rather than The Old Man of the Mountain (RIP), but I think the FREE button connects to New Hampshire better than anything else connects to South Dakota.
All of this is to say: I’d love to know if you can improve on this game in any way!
One other thing to mention about all of this: I had originally planned to include Washington DC and Puerto Rico, but that led me to some long overdue reading up on the United States’ other inhabited territories (Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, US Virgin Islands, and American Samoa). The reality is that I know next to nothing about these places, aside from the fact that the people who live there pay taxes but can’t vote and that the Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that basically it’s ok to not treat them well. So instead of trying to shoehorn in a Spanish flag, beach, and cutesy rock Emoji since Dwayne Johnson is Samoan, I figured I’ll save all that for something to write about in the future. For now, here’s my first attempt at taking in a full picture of the United States.
Thanks for reading (and playing),
— Grif