Earlier this month, the Unicode Consortium–a nonprofit made up of member companies including Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and more–announced a new version of the Unicode Standard that would bring more than than 250 new emoji to people's devices in the near future. Included in the list of new emoji are a golfer, a racing motorbike, a beach with an umbrella, and a derelict firm building. Why were these emoji chosen, and not others?

The simple answer is: they weren't chosen, not really. Any child at bedtime asking his or her mother "Mommy, where do emoji come from?" will no dubiousness become to sleep disappointed. There is no committee that decides that there needs to be a chipmunk emoji, or that an aardvark emoji would just be beyond the pale. Rather, emoji–similar language itself–has a life of its own.

Numbers First

The offset affair to understand is that computers don't really empathise text. They simply understand numbers. When you send a message on your smartphone, you aren't actually sending text to someone. Your smartphone is taking a message, breaking it downwards into a sequence of numbers (called bytes), and then beaming them to some other smartphone, where those numbers are so shown to you as text characters, thanks to fonts.


This system is chosen Unicode, and information technology's a sort of man-to-computer Rosetta Stone. It'south an encoding standard that makes sure the message sent from your iPhone in America tin be read on an Android phone in Argentine republic or a Windows Phone in Siberia. Text shown on different devices might take dissimilar typefaces and font sizes, but the actual meaning will exist the same.

As part of the standard, the Unicode Consortium maintains a giant database of international symbols, each of which corresponds to a unique number a estimator tin can understand. Letters, numbers, and punctuation marks are part of this database, simply Unicode likewise contains many other symbols, such every bit the glyphs used to transcribe Chinese, or pictographs, like emoji. Think of it similar a behemothic reference chart, with bytes on one side, and a pictorial representation of a character on the other, and you've got the correct idea.

What Gets Added To The Unicode Database?

Not merely whatever grapheme or symbol can get added to the Unicode database. Instead, every petition for a new symbol has to undergo a complicated vetting procedure. Speaking to Co.Design, Mark Davis, president of the Unicode Consortium, the major criterion for determining whether or not a new graphic symbol or symbol is added to the standard is if it's already being used extensively in text-based communication: for case, in analog print, or in writing.

"It has to be in the wild already," says Davis. You can't just design a new graphic symbol and submit it to Unicode for approval: you need to basically testify that the Unicode standard has a pigsty in it without that graphic symbol, because people are already using it to communicate every single day. Even if yous do testify it, though, getting the character adopted tin take years. For an extreme example, consider Egyptian hieroglyphics. Although they have been used for thousands of years, and scholars write almost them every mean solar day, they were only added to the Unicode standard in 2010.

Given the higher up criteria, it seems incredible that Unicode has as all-encompassing an emoji library as information technology does. Emoji are fun, but are they essential? Apparently, yes.

Emoji Are Essential To Advice

The explanation for why Unicode supports cartoon hot dogs, piles of poo and raspberrying ghosts at all is actually fairly straightforward: Emoji were proven to be essential. Although emoji weren't officially part of the Unicode Standard until 2010, the colorful drawing symbols accept been a major part of Japanese smartphone culture since 1998, when they debuted every bit a cute software characteristic on local phones. Pretty soon, millions of Japanese phones across multiple carriers came with huge emoji libraries pre-installed.


The problem, though, was that phones outside of Nippon didn't sympathize emoji, because Unicode didn't support them. If a Japanese child sent an American friend a bulletin with an emoji, his telephone would only cough up some gibberish. For hardware and software makers, this meant that if they wanted their devices to back up emoji, they couldn't rely upon the Unicode Standard. They had to hack in back up for emoji, obviating the point of adopting Unicode in the start place.

In 2010, Unicode revealed the 6.0 version of the standard, including a library of 722 emoji that were common to all three of the major prison cell phone carriers in Japan. Unicode didn't pattern or create any of these emoji. In fact, these emoji often look very unlike from ane device to some other, thanks to the fact that emojis, like letters, come in fonts. The reason that they be at all in the Unicode Standard, though, is considering they spread virally through Japan and into the rest of the world, despite the fact that Unicode didn't support them, largely because big companies like Apple tree and Google added their own support.

The "new" emoji being added to Unicode as part of the 7.0 standard are actually even older. In fact, they are mostly fabricated up of symbols that have been in use since 1990 equally function of Microsoft's Wingdings and Webdings fonts, which ship with every version of Microsoft Function. These emoji have spent the improve part of a quarter century being used every mean solar day before condign standard.

The truth is that adding new emoji to Unicode isn't that much different than adding a 27th alphabetic character to the alphabet. First, you've got to apply it yourself. So, yous've got to get other people using it. And finally, y'all have to prove to experts that the alphabet has a hole in it without information technology. That might be enough to brand an amateur emoji designer despair, merely the fact that every smartphone on World now ships with a grapheme representing a pile of anthropomorphic poo on it proves that it tin be done.