Emoji crept into everyday life so quietly that most of us barely noticed. They also have a funny habit of ignoring size. On a phone keyboard, the chicken is exactly as big as the car.
That joke is what inspired designer Javier Bórquez to build Emoji to Scale, a scrolling line-up of emoji arranged by how big the real thing actually is.
What is the biggest emoji?
By real-world size, it is the Milky Way 🌌. The smallest is the mosquito 🦟, at about 3 millimeters, just edging out the ant 🐜 at 3.7. Close to the top of the scale sit the Sun, Saturn, Earth and the Moon.
Bórquez launched the project in December 2021 and has said the first version took about six hours to build. It now holds 181 emoji across animals, nature, objects and landmarks, and scrolling from one end to the other is a genuinely pleasant way to lose ten minutes. The jumps are the fun part, especially the sudden lurch at the very end, from planet-sized to galaxy-sized. He has since made a sibling project, Emoji to Speed.
Every emoji on your phone started life as a proposal to the Unicode Consortium, which reviews and approves new ones each year. The latest batch, Emoji 18.0, arrived in September 2026 with a pickle, a lighthouse, a monarch butterfly, a meteor and an eraser among the additions, bringing the full set to 3,972.
Here is the whole thing in motion.
If you enjoy this kind of beautiful time-waster, try Stimulation Clicker, or see the emoji that may best sum up 2025. There’s more playful design in our design stories.
