After a pandemic-related delay, the Unicode Standard version 14.0 has been finalized and released version. We’re getting a total of 838 new characters and it includes 37 new emoji characters. You’ll soon be getting emojis like melting face, biting lip, troll, beans, pouring liquid, pregnant man, and pregnant person. Of course, these will not be immediately available as operating systems and apps will still be working on support for these so we’ll see updates and releases a few months from now.
The final list of emojis that we’re getting is actually the same as the draft version that was released a few months ago. So if you’ve seen that list, the announcement of Unicode 14.0 will not be a surprise. There were some that were removed including “vulture,” “crow,” “raised little finger,” “cooking pot,” “chainsaw,” and “submarine” but we might still see them in future versions. For now, we’re getting 37 new ones that they think are the most relevant.
The finalized list includes several versions of existing and new emojis hence the 838 new characters. This includes multiple skin variations of the handshake emoji which previously couldn’t be modified because of some technical limitations. Now we finally get representations of different skin shades, something that we’ve seen over the years to be important to a lot of users. Unicode 14.0 has 75 skin tone variations as per Emojipedia.
Seven new smileys are included in this batch, for those who still prefer to use the always reliable smileys when conversing online. You have melting face, face with open eyes and hand over mouth, face with peeking eye, saluting face, dotted line face, face with diagonal mouth, and face holding back tears. We also get the coral emoji to represent the effects of climate change and mirror ball to represent those who like disco.
We’ll probably see these new emojis a few months from now as OS and app developers will now have to work on getting support for Unicode 14.0. We’ll most likely report when these will finally be released for your devices.
