157 New Emojis Including Woozy Face and Pirate Flag are Coming to Your Phone Later This Year

The Unicode Consortium has released Emoji 11.0 data with 157 new emoji characters, bringing the total number of approved emojis to 2,823. The latest emoji list, which is "fixed and final," includes a man and woman emoji in various hairstyles, including red-haired, curly-haired, white-haired, and bald, as well new superhero and supervillain characters in multiple skin tones. All the newly made emojis should be available on mobile phones and other devices sometime in August or September. In the meanwhile, sample images suggesting the new emojis are available on the Web.

Emojipedia, which is an online encyclopedia for emojis, has developed a video to give a glimpse of all the new emojis that are coming this year. The nearly two-minute video shows various new faces, including a partying face, pledging face, woozy face, smiling with 3 hearts, hot face, and cold face. Similarly, there are emoji characters defining living beings other than humans, such as a microbe, mosquito, parrot, peacock, badger, raccoon, swan, kangaroo, and lobster among others. There are also science-centric objects in the form of a test tube, petri dish, and DNA.

The new emoji characters are currently available as "just samples", which means software vendors will be able to design their own emoji sets. This will mainly help Apple, Google, and Microsoft to construct emoji characters as per their requirements and make them compatible with their software. Moreover, the version number for the newest Unicode emoji release is jumping directly from the previously released Emoji 5.0 to Emoji 11.0, instead of a 6.0 version, to synchronise the version number for emojis with the corresponding version number of the Unicode Standard.

You can expect the new emoji release on your Android or iOS devices in the coming months. Moreover, apps such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are likely to include the new emoji characters later this year.

Last year, emoji characters were in the headlines multiple times. There was an intense debate on Twitter over the cheese placement in a burger that brought an update to Android's original cheeseburger emoji. Separately, the middle finger emoji on WhatsApp saw an allegation of obscene and lewd gesture. WhatsApp even faced a legal notice by a Delhi-based advocate for having the objectionable emoji on its platform.