Quip Blog

Feature Highlight: Emoji

By Molly Graham

Sometimes, words don't cut it, and you find yourself trying to say something that you wish you could just show instead. For those times, there's emoji—a fun way to express what you mean through pictures and cartoons in messages in Quip. For those of you who've never heard of emoji, here is how Wikipedia describes them:

Emoji (絵文字, or えもじ) is the Japanese term for the ideograms or smileys used in Japanese electronic messages and webpages. Originally meaning pictograph, the word literally means "picture" (e) + "letter" (moji). The characters are used much like emoticons elsewhere, but a wider range is provided, and the icons are standardized and built into the handsets.

Instead of congratulating a coworker for a job well done, why not just send her a thumbs up? Maybe she told a joke, and you want to send a laughing smiley face rather than “haha”. Or maybe you just want to send a picture of a water buffalo, for no reason in particular. Whatever your mood or circumstance, there's an emoji to express it.

To add emoji, just type a colon (“:”), followed by the first few letters of the emoji you want to send, into the message bar in Quip. Try :whale: or :pizza: or :tongue:.

Take a look at the emoji cheat sheet to see a list of all the emojis you can use.