This past Monday, the Unicode Consortium had announced an update to the Unicode Standard, bringing the version up to 7.0 and introduced support for 2,834 new characters, especially those for new currencies, historic scripts, written languages for various regions etc., as well as 250 new emoji. It was the last bit that got the Internet most excited, particularly since the new characters included the likes of the infamous middle finger. Today, the Consortium has finally made available a full chart of all the new Emojis that have been added for our perusal.
According to Unicode’s own claim, “Most of the new emoji characters derive from characters in long-standing and widespread use in Wingdings and Webdings fonts.” What this means for us is that we’ll be able to better express our feelings using these weird characters that we see flying around pretty much everywhere these days. And since Unicode is a universal format, the support will express itself everywhere – from computers to the Internet to mobile phones (not just smartphones) etc. That’s convenient.
The chart released today highlights the character additions in yellow, should you be interested in taking a look yourself, and includes some mundane ones like flying flags, a thermometer, a droplet, to the outright offensive ones like the middle finger on a reversed hand, a cactus in a desert, the coliseum, a creepy looking eye, as well as several other “pointy” fingers, among others. The full list is pretty interesting to look at, even if you don’t use emoji characters a lot.
The complete list of emoji characters are as follows:
Even though it’s just 250 new emoji characters out of almost 2,800, it goes a long way to show how much we rely on these little pictographs to express what we want to say. The saying that a picture is worth a thousand words is probably now truer than ever, and hey, if we were to look at this addition that way, it’s not just 250 small icons – it’s 250 new ways that the Unicode Consortium has given you to express yourself in. So, which one is your favorite? Let us know.
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