# Add Emoji To GitHub Repository Description

GitHub restricts the set of unicode characters that can appear in the
description field of a repository to anything up to `0xffff`. Most emoji
have unicode values above this. This means you will have limited success
adding emoji via your system's.

Fortunately, GitHub allows you to add any recognized emoji to a repository
description with its specialized emoji syntax (e.g. `:memo:`). You may have
used this syntax in other parts of GitHub such as the issue tracker.

If you add an emoji like this:

![](http://i.imgur.com/Tty7Cl2.png)

it will show up like so:

![](http://i.imgur.com/yxRwmkW.png)