Revealed: The 8 new emoji officially coming to your smartphone next year – including one character that X users claim they’ve been ‘seen’ with
From friendly smileys to mischievous peaches, emojis are a staple in many of our everyday messages.
Eight new emoji have now been confirmed for version 16.0 of the Unicode Standard.
This includes a harp, a shovel and a mudguard, as well as a face with bags under the eyes.
While users will have to wait until next year to use the new emojis, they have already caused quite a stir on social media.
“Representation is important. Thanks Unicode team,” one user joked, referring to the new face with bags under her eyes.
From friendly smileys to cheeky peaches, emojis are a staple of many of our daily messages. Now, eight new emoji have been confirmed for version 16.0 of the Unicode Standard
One user took to X (formerly Twitter) to express his excitement about the new face, joking: ‘I finally feel truly seen’
The newest emoji have been confirmed by the Unicode Consortium and include a face with bags under its eyes, a fingerprint, a splash, a root vegetable, a leafless tree, a harp, a shovel, and the flag of Sark, an island in the English Channel.
“Unicode version 16.0 has been released!” the Unicode Consortium tweeted.
‘This brings the total number of characters to 154,998!’
The addition of the flag for Sark is surprising, because as the Unicode Consortium itself admits, the Consortium decided back in March 2022 to no longer add new flag emojis.
Emojipedia at the time pointed out the “ephemeral nature” of many flags and the “challenges of recognizing certain identities while excluding others.”
Keith Broni, editor-in-chief of Emojipedia, said, “This policy remains in effect, although Unicode did indicate at the time this policy was announced that additional national/regional flags might emerge in the future.”
“Representation is important. Thanks Unicode team,” one user joked, referring to the new face with bags under her eyes
The new emoji will be released in the coming months and in 2025. However, several users have already taken to X (formerly Twitter) en masse to express their enthusiasm for the emoji with the ‘face with bags under the eyes’.
Another enthusiastic user added: ‘the perfect answer for any interaction on Slack, no matter what’
The new emoji will appear in the coming months and throughout 2025.
However, several users have already expressed their enthusiasm en masse on X (formerly Twitter) about the ‘face with bags under the eyes’ emoji.
“I finally feel seen,” one user tweeted.
Another added: “the perfect answer for any interaction on Slack, no matter what.”
And someone joked: ‘Finally an emoji that reflects my permanent mood.’
ARE EMOJIS RUINING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE?
Emojis may be a fun form of communication, but they’re destroying the English language, according to a recent Google study.
Teenagers prefer to communicate with smileys, hearts, thumbs up and other cartoonish symbols, rather than words, and are considered the biggest culprits when it comes to the decline of grammar and punctuation.
More than a third of British adults believe emojis are causing a decline in accurate language use, according to research commissioned by Google-owned YouTube.
Emojis were first used by Japanese mobile phone companies in the late 1990s to express an emotion, concept or message in a simple, graphic way. Now Twitter feeds, text messages and Facebook posts are full of them
Of the 2,000 adults aged 16 to 65 who were asked for their opinion, 94 percent believed that English language skills were declining, with 80 percent identifying young people as the biggest culprits.
The most common mistakes Brits make are spelling mistakes (21 percent), followed by using apostrophes (16 percent) and incorrectly using commas (16 percent).
The research also found that more than half of British adults lack confidence in their spelling and grammar skills.
Additionally, about three-quarters of adults use emojis to communicate, along with predictive text and spell check.
The use of emojis has become so pervasive in our culture that the Oxford Dictionary’s “Word of the Year” for 2015 wasn’t a word at all, but the Face with Tears emoji. That shows just how influential these little graphics have become.
They were first used in the late 1990s by Japanese mobile phone companies to express an emotion, concept or message in a simple, graphical way.