The Unicode Consortium has finalized and released version 16.0 of the Unicode standard. The update adds 5,185 new characters to the standard, raising the total up to 154,998.
Andrew Cunningham for Ars Technica:
Of those 5,185 characters, the ones that will get the most attention are the eight new emoji characters, including a shovel, a fingerprint, a leafless tree, a radish (formally classified as “root vegetable”), a harp, a purple splat that evokes the ’90s Nickelodeon logo, and a flag for the island of Sark. The standout, of course, is “face with bags under eyes,” whose long-suffering thousand-yard stare perfectly encapsulates the era [into which] it has been born.
Incorporation into the Unicode standard is only the first step that new emoji and other characters take on their journey from someone’s mind to your phone or computer; software makers like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, and others need to design iterations that fit with their existing spin on the emoji characters, they need to release software updates that use the new characters, and people need to download and install them.
MacDailyNews Take: “Face with bags under eyes” could prove to be very useful.
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