What’s New in Unicode 15.0
The latest emoji list drafted by the Unicode Consortium is due for formal approval today, with new emojis including a Goose, a Hyacinth, a Shaking Face, and a plain Pink Heart.
Unicode 15.0 includes 4,489 new characters, of which 20 are brand new emoji code points.
Additionally, the Emoji 15.0 recommendation list which accompanies Unicode 15.0 includes an additional 11 emoji sequence recommendations, leading to a total of 31 new emojis being approved for release today.
The most attention-grabbing aspect of draft Emoji 15.0 list was the inclusion of the much-requested plain Pink Heart emoji.
Proposals for new emojis can come from a variety of sources, including members of the public.
Example color images are commonly shown on pages of new emoji information by Unicode and come from various sources. These are intended to convey the preferred design choices for vendors when implementing emojis.
In recent years new updates have been more closely aligned to these color images than in the past. While the designs shown on these emoji information pages aren’t formally part of the Unicode Standard, they do provide useful direction for implementors.
What’s New in Unicode 15.1 & Emoji 15.1
The latest list of emoji recommendations drafted by the Unicode Consortium – Emoji 15.1 – has been formally approved. This means that 118 new emojis should be arriving across our various digital devices over the next year or so.
New Emojis in Emoji 15.1
These 118 new emojis introduced in Emoji 15.1 include six completely new concepts, four new gender-neutral family emoji combinations, and 108 new direction-specifying versions of six pre-existing people emojis.
Example color images are commonly shown on pages of new emoji information by Unicode and come from various sources. These are intended to convey the preferred design choices for vendors when implementing emojis.
However, while Emoji 15.1 contains brand-new emojis, since these are all constructed via ZWJ sequences, Unicode 15.1 did not require any brand-new emoji characters to enable the creation of Emoji 15.1.
This means that Unicode 15.1 is the first update to the Unicode Standard to not feature the creation of any new emoji characters since May 2019’s Unicode 12.1 – a minor update to the standard that added just a single new non-emoji character to enable software to be rapidly updated to support the new Japanese era name in calendrical systems and date formatting
Prior to Unicode 12.1, new emoji characters had been added to every update to the Unicode Standard from 2014’s Unicode 7.0 onwards.
Despite not containing any new emoji characters, Unicode 15.1 does induce several hundred new non-emoji characters to the Unicode Standard.
