Monday, June 6, 2016

72 New Emoji Characters

[Emoji Image] The 72 new emoji characters for Unicode 9.0 are now final, and listed in Emoji Recently Added. They include 7 faces, 7 people, 7 hand gestures, 14 plants/animals, 18 food emoji, 12 sports emoji, and a few others. The corresponding documentation in UTR #51 Unicode Emoji, Version 3.0 has also been updated, with additional guidelines for implementers and the new versions of the emoji data files. These should appear on smart phones and other devices that support emoji once vendors have a chance to update them.

Four of the new emoji are added to complete gender pairs. Work has already begun on the Version 4.0 of Unicode Emoji, with a focus on further enhancing gender representation, and targeted to appear in the near future.

The new emoji characters will soon be available for adoption, helping support projects to improve language support.