The Unicode Consortium, the nonprofit organization that creates and maintains the global standard for emoji, has announced the release of a new set of emoji that will be available on phones in 2020. The new set includes 20 new emoji, including ones for people with disabilities, animals, food items, and more. “We’re excited to add these new emojis to our repertoire and help make communication more inclusive,” said Emoji Subcommittee Chairwoman Karen Tamura in a statement. “They’ll be especially useful for conveying nuanced emotions and communicating across cultures.” Some of the new emoji include a woman with curly hair wearing a headscarf, an elderly person with a walking stick, and two people holding hands. There’s also an emoji for a wheelchair user and one for an animal shelter. ..
Emoji 15.0 has been released, and it formalizes the addition of a bunch of new emoji. Among the additions, we have a pink heart, which has been requested by many for years, alongside new light blue and gray hearts. Other ones include leftward and rightward pushing hands, a shaking face, maracas, a moose, a donkey, and a Wi-Fi symbol.
With 20 all-new emoji and 11 new sequences, 10 of them being skin tone modifiers, the total is brought up to 31 additions. The total of Unicode-recommended emoji is now up to 3,664.
You won’t be able to use these new emoji right now. Rather, you’ll need to wait until your device receives an update adding support for them. Updates for Android 13 and iOS 16 will likely come out over the next months supporting the new emoji. Google has confirmed that all of them are coming to Android soon, and they will become available across Google products early next year. Likewise, apps like WhatsApp will probably also add support for them individually for devices that are unsupported by those updates.
Until then, you can also copy and paste the Unicode symbols for those emoji, although at the time of writing, you probably can’t see more than a black/white square on any device.
Source: Emojipedia, Google
