this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
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So I just looked it up, the UTF-8 encoding for the cactus emoji is 4 bytes long: 0xF0 0x9F 0x8C 0xB5

Where the Latin alphabet is in the 1-byte region.

So it takes 6 bytes to transmit "cactus" in UTF-8, and only 4 to transmit โ€œ๐ŸŒตโ€. So any emoji that replaces 5 or more letters is more efficient. ๐Ÿ† breaks even with "dick" or "cock", more efficient than "penis", more than twice as compact as "eggplant" or "aubergine".