There’s no doubting the popularity of the emoji in the 21st century. The Unicode Consortium, the world body responsible for the handling of text expressed in most of the world’s writing systems, emojis included, has released the Unicode Standard, Version 10.0.0. And yes, this means more emojis to choose from.
Version 10.0.0 was released yesterday, 20th June 2017, which effectively added 8,518 characters to the Unicode Standard, bringing the total up to 136,690 characters. Additionally, the update includes 4 new scripts and, most notably, 56 new emoji characters.
We aren’t too sure who is in charge of the list for new emojis, which includes a “bearded man”, “mage”, “zombie”, “T-Rex”, “Colbert emoji”, and much more. While these may be useless inclusions for many, or useful depending on which side you fall, it isn’t as bizarre as the addition of a male fairy, broccoli or a tin of canned tomatoes. There is, however, a few nice-to-haves, such as the “mind blown” emoji and, my favourite, “raised eyebrow” emoji. The update also sees the addition of the Bitcoin symbol, although not in the form of an emoji.
The list of 56 new emojis was finalised back in March of this year, which sees a total of 183 when you account for gender and skin tone variations. The pre-release of the emojis also mean that operating systems such as Android and iOS will feature the new emojis in the next firmware updates, which has already surfaced within the Android O-beta rollout. There’s no official announcement as yet for the iOS update, which is expected to be released during the next iPhone event in September. Apps such as WhatsApp will also receive the required updates once the respective device firmware has been updated to include the latest Unicode Stanard.
For a full list of emojis released, you can visit the Emojipedia blog for the Unicode version 10.0.0 feature.
