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Unicode 9.0 Brings Selfie, Shrug, Facepalm, and More New Emojis

Unicode 9.0 Brings Selfie, Shrug, Facepalm, and More New Emojis

By Tasneem Akolawala | Updated: 23 June 2016 09:56 IST

Highlights

Unicode 9.0 is now official.
It brings 72 new emojis.
A total of 7,500 characters have been added.

The Unicode Consortium has released the Unicode 9.0 standard, bringing new characters and emojis. Unicode 9 brings 72 new emojis that include a shrug, facepalm, fingers crossed, drooling, selfie, and even an emoji depicting rolling on the floor laughing (ROFL).

In the wake of Rio Olympics slated to begin in August this year, the new emojis represent many new sports like juggling, water polo, fencing, handball, boxing, and even wrestling. There's also an emoji of a person doing a cartwheel, a goal net emoji, and a martial arts uniform emoji. Silver, Gold, and Bronze Medal emojis have also been listed.

Other new emojis include the much needed fingers crossed emoji, alongside the facepalm, rolling on the floor, shrug, handshake, and a call me hand emoji. Other interesting emojis include a lying face, a pregnant woman, a nauseated face, a sneezing face, a drooling face, a clown face, and a face with cowboy hat emoji. There's also more representation of food, flowers, animals, birds, and drinks in the emoji list. The full list of new emojis introduced in Unicode 9 can be viewed here.

Unicode 9 added as many as 7,500 characters, bringing it to a sum total of 128,172 characters. Apart from the 72 emojis, these new characters also include six new scripts and 19 symbols for the new 4K TV standard. These scripts also add support for lesser known languages like Osage, Nepal Bhasa, Fulani, the Bravanese dialect of Swahili, Warsh orthography for Arabic, and Tangut.

Unicode had deliberated to put a rifle in its set of new emoji standard, but then decided against it. Pressure from companies like Apple, and Microsoft, and their decision to not support the emoji made Unicorn not include the rifle emoji altogether.

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