  Emojis come with prepacked semantics making them great candidates to create
new forms of more accessible communications. Yet, little is known about how
much of this emojis semantic is agreed upon by humans, outside of textual
contexts. Thus, we collected a crowdsourced dataset of one-word emoji
descriptions for 1,289 emojis presented to participants with no surrounding
text. The emojis and their interpretations were then examined for ambiguity. We
find that with 30 annotations per emoji, 16 emojis (1.2%) are completely
unambiguous, whereas 55 emojis (4.3%) are so ambiguous that their descriptions
are indistinguishable from randomly chosen descriptions. Most of studied emojis
are spread out between the two extremes. Furthermore, investigating the
ambiguity of different types of emojis, we find that an important factor is the
extent to which an emoji has an embedded symbolical meaning drawn from an
established code-book of symbols. We conclude by discussing design
implications.
