Emojis have been the most silent way someone can express a feeling about something. Unicode which is the computing industry's standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed, is releasing version 9.0 on July 13th, 2017.
The update aims to further complete the world of emojification.
The Unicode Consortium announced Unicode Standard Version 9.0, complete with 72 new emoji characters - with the most important of which include ROFL face, face palm, fingers crossed, drooling face, lying face, nauseated, and shrug.
Other notable additions to Version 9.0 include emojis for selfie, fox, gorilla, scooter (both kick and motorized), as well as bacon.
Those aforementioned emojis are new to Unicode, but some of them aren't new to some messaging apps. Some of those apps have chosen to add their own emojis to enhance the standard characters supplied previously by Unicode. While they may come up with those emojis sooner, they don't have the advantage of the standard Unicode's, which are cross-platform compatible and system-wide availability.
In total, Unicode 9.0 brings 7,500 new characters to the standard for a total of 128,172 Unicode characters.
The Unicode Consortium also introduced six new language scripts including Osage, a Native American language; Nepal Bhasa; Fulani, an African language; Bravanese, a Swahili dialect from Somalia; Warsh orthography for Arabic; and Tangut, an ancient Chinese language.
And with the new introduction of standard emojis, various platforms are free to interpret the actual look of the emoji as they see fit.
Twitter, The Early Adopter
Twitter that is one of the most popular, but struggling social media, has become the first social platform to offer support for Unicode's new batch of emojis. That means, Twitter users can use all of its 72 emojis.
The update has been rolled out for Twitter on the web, just in time for the World Emoji Day which takes place on July 17th. Among the new emoji faces include: ROFL smiley, nausea face, selfie, face palm, lying face and the creepy clown face.
Beside introducing new emojis to its platform, Twitter also made some minor modification to the appearances of its existing icons. For example: some human appearance emojis now support skin tone modifiers. Additional dimensional element details have been added to emojis that represent objects, making them to appear less flat.
Twitter also put a few minor details, such as adding a hat and sunglasses to the levitating business man emoji.
While more emojis allows people to define and express their feelings in a more ways, most computer keyboards don't support manually typing in emojis just yet. More emojis also makes it hard for Twitter users to use the emojis.
Currently the only way to use them is to copy and paste them from online resources such as Emojipedia or Emoji Keyboard.