Before this month, the Unicode Consortium–a nonprofit made upwards of member companies including Apple tree, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and more–announced a new version of the Unicode Standard that would bring more 250 new emoji to people's devices in the near time to come. Included in the listing of new emoji are a golfer, a racing motorcycle, a beach with an umbrella, and a derelict house building. Why were these emoji called, and not others?

The simple respond is: they weren't called, not actually. Whatever child at bedtime asking his or her mother "Mommy, where do emoji come from?" will no uncertainty become to sleep disappointed. There is no committee that decides that at that place needs to exist a chipmunk emoji, or that an aardvark emoji would just exist across the pale. Rather, emoji–similar language itself–has a life of its ain.

Numbers First

The first thing to understand is that computers don't really understand text. They but sympathize numbers. When you send a message on your smartphone, you aren't really sending text to someone. Your smartphone is taking a message, breaking it down into a sequence of numbers (called bytes), and then beaming them to some other smartphone, where those numbers are then shown to you as text characters, cheers to fonts.


This system is called Unicode, and it's a sort of human-to-computer Rosetta Stone. Information technology's an encoding standard that makes sure the message sent from your iPhone in America can be read on an Android telephone in Argentina or a Windows Phone in Siberia. Text shown on different devices might have dissimilar typefaces and font sizes, only the bodily significant will be 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 figurer can sympathize. Letters, numbers, and punctuation marks are office of this database, but Unicode also contains many other symbols, such equally the glyphs used to transcribe Chinese, or pictographs, like emoji. Think of it like a giant reference chart, with bytes on one side, and a pictorial representation of a character on the other, and you've got the right idea.

What Gets Added To The Unicode Database?

Not just any character or symbol tin can get added to the Unicode database. Instead, every petition for a new symbol has to undergo a complicated vetting process. Speaking to Co.Design, Mark Davis, president of the Unicode Consortium, the major criterion for determining whether or not a new character or symbol is added to the standard is if it'south already being used extensively in text-based communication: for instance, in analog print, or in writing.

"Information technology has to exist in the wild already," says Davis. You can't just design a new character and submit it to Unicode for approval: you need to basically bear witness that the Unicode standard has a hole in it without that grapheme, because people are already using it to communicate every single day. Even if you exercise prove it, though, getting the character adopted tin can take years. For an farthermost example, consider Egyptian hieroglyphics. Although they accept been used for thousands of years, and scholars write nearly them every solar day, they were only added to the Unicode standard in 2010.

Given the above criteria, it seems incredible that Unicode has as extensive an emoji library as it does. Emoji are fun, just are they essential? Patently, yes.

Emoji Are Essential To Advice

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


The problem, though, was that phones outside of Japan didn't understand emoji, because Unicode didn't support them. If a Japanese kid sent an American friend a bulletin with an emoji, his phone would just coughing up some gibberish. For hardware and software makers, this meant that if they wanted their devices to support emoji, they couldn't rely upon the Unicode Standard. They had to hack in support for emoji, obviating the betoken of adopting Unicode in the kickoff place.

In 2010, Unicode revealed the half dozen.0 version of the standard, including a library of 722 emoji that were mutual to all iii of the major jail cell phone carriers in Japan. Unicode didn't design or create whatever of these emoji. In fact, these emoji often look very different from one device to some other, cheers to the fact that emojis, like letters, come in fonts. The reason that they exist at all in the Unicode Standard, though, is because they spread virally through Nippon and into the balance of the world, despite the fact that Unicode didn't back up them, largely considering big companies like Apple and Google added their own support.

The "new" emoji being added to Unicode equally part of the 7.0 standard are actually even older. In fact, they are by and large made upwards of symbols that take been in use since 1990 every bit part of Microsoft's Wingdings and Webdings fonts, which ship with every version of Microsoft Office. These emoji take spent the better part of a quarter century being used every day earlier becoming standard.

The truth is that adding new emoji to Unicode isn't that much unlike than adding a 27th letter to the alphabet. Beginning, you've got to use information technology yourself. So, you've got to go other people using it. And finally, yous take to prove to experts that the alphabet has a hole in it without it. That might be plenty to make an apprentice emoji designer despair, simply the fact that every smartphone on Earth now ships with a character representing a pile of anthropomorphic poo on it proves that it can be done.