⏳ Older or Newer — Emoji Timeline Quiz

Emoji arrived in waves. Can you tell a 2010 original from a 2021 newcomer?

✓ Free Forever · ✓ No Signup · ✓ No Upload · ✓ Works Offline

🔒 Your game stays in your browser. Rounds are generated on your device and your best score is saved only in this browser. No account, no leaderboard server, nothing about how you play is uploaded or tracked.

Features

  • Twelve years of emoji — From the 2010 originals to Emoji 15.0 (2022), the newest release in the Twemoji artwork this site uses, dated by Unicode’s own emoji version data.
  • Difficulty is the gap — Easy keeps the two emoji six or more years apart, Medium three to five, Hard just one or two, which is genuinely hard.
  • You learn the answer — Every round reveals both release years and emoji versions, so a wrong guess still teaches you something.
  • Best score saved locally — Your high score lives on your own device — not on a server, and not attached to any account.

How It Works

  1. Pick a difficulty — This sets how far apart the two emoji are in time, and how long you get.
  2. Compare the two — Older emoji skew simple and universal; newer ones are more specific.
  3. Tap the older one — Both release years appear as soon as you answer. 15 rounds.

Use Cases

  • Learn when your favourite emoji actually showed up
  • A fast round between tasks
  • Beat your own best score

Frequently Asked Questions

How does the emoji timeline quiz work?

Each round shows two emoji and asks which one became an emoji first. Answer before the clock runs out and both Emoji versions and years appear. There are 15 rounds, and faster correct answers score more.

Where do the dates come from?

Which emoji is older is decided by the Emoji version Unicode assigns to each character, the release in which it became an emoji, so the scoring is straight from the standard. The year on the reveal is when that Emoji version was published: presentation only, never what decides whether you were right.

Why does the skull say 2015? It’s older than that.

As a Unicode character, yes: ☠️ skull and crossbones and ⌨️ keyboard have been in Unicode since 1993, and 🐅 tiger and 🚁 helicopter since 2010. But Unicode’s emoji data lists them as emoji from Emoji 1.0 (2015), and that is what this game goes by: when a character became an emoji, not when the character was first encoded.

Why do some emoji never come up?

The pool is the emoji from the Smileys, Animals, Food, Travel, Activities and Objects groups that this site’s emoji games use, so people, symbols and flags never come up. It runs from Emoji 0.6 (2010) to Emoji 15.0 (2022): newer emoji aren’t in the Twemoji artwork used here, and Emoji 4.0 and 12.1 were almost all variants of people. Emoji 0.7 is skipped on purpose: sources disagree on its release date, and I would rather leave those emoji out than print a year I cannot stand behind.

Why are so many emoji from 2010?

Because that is when the bulk of them landed. The 2010 batch was the original mass import of Japanese carrier emoji into Unicode and it dwarfs every wave since — so if you are stuck, guessing the plainer, more universal emoji is a decent heuristic.

Notes from Milo 🐨

2026-10-06

I played a round on Hard, the level whose button said "1y apart", and the two emoji were twelve years apart. The gap was only a minimum, so Hard drew from every pair. Now each level is a real range: Easy six or more years, Medium three to five, Hard one or two. I also fixed the question. The game goes by Unicode’s Emoji version, which is when a character became an emoji, not when it joined Unicode: the skull and crossbones has been a Unicode character since 1993 and only counts as an emoji from 2015. The page now asks the question it actually scores, and the FAQ explains the skull. The "Correct!" line is announced to screen readers and readable in light mode.

Related Tools

💬 Bug, idea, or just to say hi? Tell Milo 🐨 · [email protected]