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 “🌵”. So any emoji that replaces 5 or more letters is more efficient. 🍆 breaks even with “dick” or “cock”, more efficient than “penis”, more than twice as compact as “eggplant” or “aubergine”.
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 “🌵”. So any emoji that replaces 5 or more letters is more efficient. 🍆 breaks even with “dick” or “cock”, more efficient than “penis”, more than twice as compact as “eggplant” or “aubergine”.