Emoji Spelling Bee

Photo Credit: Jennifer 8. Lee/Emojicon. Can be freely used in any context that discusses the Emoji Spelling Bee.

The first Emoji Spelling Bee took place at Emojicon on November 5-6, 2016 in San Francisco.

The first winner of the Emoji Spelling Bee was Sam Lemonick of Berkeley, California. He won a trip for two to Finland ✈️ 🇫🇮 courtesy of the Finnish government! Presenting his prize is Petra Theman, Finland’s director of public diplomacy who oversaw the launch of Finland’s official national emoji.

The preliminary online competition attracted over 70 entrants (many of which got a Breaking Bad emoji mug for their participation). The second IRL round attracted 40 contestants.

Prompts throughout the rounds included:

• Cubs win! 
• Bay to Breakers
• On fleek
• Moving to Canada
• San Francisco
• Finnish sauna

Judging was based on parsimony, whimsy and accuracy. Our advice: Be short, be sweet, answer the question.

You can see the answers for the live round here, and read more about the whole event in detail here.

Judges included Petra Theman and Thuong Tan (Team Finland), Mercedes Kraus (Emojicon), Zoe Mendelson (Emojicon), and Neal Mueller (the emcee of the Emoji Spelling Bee).

Special thanks to Finland's office of Public Diplomacy and Timberland, for providing great prizes.

Our judges were Gretchen McCulloch, linguist; Jane Solomon of Dictionary.com, and Erin McKean of Wordnik.

Special thanks to Finland's office of Public Diplomacy for sponsoring the posters.

Europe’s premier foray into competitive emoji spelling saw 17 people from across the continent do battle within The Black Sheep ⚫🐑 bar on Capel Street in Dublin, Ireland. It was featured across a range of Irish TV 📺 and radio 📻 programmes to promote this event (such as here, here and here). Judges included Irish comedians Bláithín de Burca and Ruth Hunter.

The winner was Sean Russ from Bad Nauheim, Germany 🇩🇪. He defeated Aisling Horan from Newport, Ireland 🇮🇪 2–0 in the finals to claim the title of Europe’s first Emoji Spelling Bee Champion 👑🥇🏆 and a prize of a €100 💯💶 One4All gift voucher. Quarterfinalists received a free burrito 🌯 voucher from Mexican restaurant chain Boojum and all semifinalists received a large emoji teddy featuring some somewhat creepy arms and legs. 👐👣😱

You can read about it in more detail on Medium.

Our first New York City Emoji Spelling Bee was extensively covered in Slate and sponsored by Tinder and Timberland. Run by Zoë Mendolsohn, it was done on Twitter, which allowed our answers to be embedded in articles. And it also had a current events and political flavor. The final prompt was “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?”

Our first ever Asian spelling bee took place as part of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival in November 2019. The prizes came from the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong, and included puzzles, umbrellas, NASA-schwag, magnets and lots more. Judges included

Ikko Yokoyama from mPlus museum in Hong Kong and two officials from the U.S. consulate general. We had about 30 participants and 3 kids.

Given the protests that were ongoing in Hong Kong. The prompts were a mix of pop culture and political. they included

Warm up: Bubble Tea, Mickey Mouse, Black Panther,
Entertainment: Bruce Lee, Frozen, Game of Thrones, Handmaid's Tale, The Avengers, Harry Potter
Hong Kong-specific ones: Rugby Sevens, Be Water, My Friend, Five Key Demands and Not One Less

We also figured out a spiffy system using Airtable. You can see the results in an Airtable chart.