A bird's nest and a melting face, a disco ball and a pregnant man: the non-profit organization Unicode Consortium has presented its update for the international character standard Unicode, which has numerous new emojis and characters. It may take a few months before the new character sets are integrated into the operating systems from Apple, Microsoft and Co. A look at the new selection is still possible, a total of 37 new emojis and 838 new characters should be available to users, according to the Emojipedia blog, by the beginning of 2022 at the latest.
Among other things, there should be seven new faces in the classic yellow smiley style.
One of them was actually already available before the update: a yellow emoji that holds its hand in front of its mouth.
However, this led to confusion when using it between different platforms.
In the versions of Google, Twitter or Microsoft, the emoji is smiling, while the same emoji looks shocked or surprised on Facebook and Apple.
In the new update, it should be uniform on all platforms.
New features include a face that holds back tears and one that holds its hands in front of its face - and pokes through the gap between its fingers.
More gender options
With three more new additions, more gender options are to be made available. In addition to the pre-existing emojis of a prince and princess, a person with no apparent gender with a crown was introduced. The already existing pregnant woman was also supplemented by a pregnant man and a pregnant gender-neutral person. They shouldn't just do justice to trans men or people who identify as non-binary when they give birth to a child. The consortium points out that the emojis can also stand for a bloated stomach or the so-called “food baby” - that is, the well-filled stomach after a long meal: “Finally an emoji for the unpleasant feeling of having eaten too much for lunch to have."
Also new are some emojis for different gestures and the option to determine the skin color of each hand individually for shaking hands. There are also some rather amusing symbols, such as a troll, a disco ball or soap bubbles. However, the wish of many users for a pink heart is not fulfilled in this update either: A new color for the heart emojis is not included in the current version, but two hands that shape a heart with your fingers.
Emojis are only a fraction of the characters that Unicode provides. They only make up 3633 of the 114,697 characters that Unicode 14.0 contains. Some novelties are 185 Znamëna characters, which are used instead of notes in Znamenny chants, for example in the Russian Orthodox Church. Likewise, the characters of the language "Toto", which is widespread in northeastern India, were introduced. On the website of the consortium it is summarized about the mission of the non-profit organization: "Everyone in the world should be able to use their own language on cell phones and computers."