Emoticons is a

Unicode block A Unicode block is one of several contiguous ranges of numeric character codes (code points) of the Unicode character set that are defined by the Unicode Consortium for administrative and documentation purposes. Typically, proposals such as the ad ...

containing

emoticon An emoticon (, , rarely , ), short for "emotion icon", also known simply as an emote, is a pictorial representation of a facial expression using Character (symbol), characters—usually punctuation marks, numbers, and letters—to express a ...

s or

emoji An emoji ( ; plural emoji or emojis) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed conversat ...

. Most of them are intended as representations of

faces The face is the front of an animal's head that features the eyes, nose and mouth, and through which animals express many of their emotions. The face is crucial for human identity, and damage such as scarring or developmental deformities may affe ...

, although some of them include

hand gesture A hand is a prehensile, multi-fingered appendage located at the end of the forearm or forelimb of primates such as humans, chimpanzees, monkeys, and lemurs. A few other vertebrates such as the koala (which has two opposable thumbs on each "hand ...

s or non-human characters (a horned "

imp IMP or imp may refer to: * Imp, a fantasy creature Arts and entertainment Fictional characters * Imp (She-Ra), a character in ''She-Ra: Princess of Power'' * Imp a character in '' Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony'' * Imp, a character in the '' Cl ...

monkey Monkey is a common name that may refer to most mammals of the infraorder Simiiformes, also known as the simians. Traditionally, all animals in the group now known as simians are counted as monkeys except the apes, which constitutes an incomple ...

cartoon A cartoon is a type of visual art that is typically drawn, frequently animated, in an unrealistic or semi-realistic style. The specific meaning has evolved over time, but the modern usage usually refers to either: an image or series of images ...

cat The cat (''Felis catus'') is a domestic species of small carnivorous mammal. It is the only domesticated species in the family Felidae and is commonly referred to as the domestic cat or house cat to distinguish it from the wild members of ...

s). The block was first proposed in 2008, and first implemented in Unicode version 6.0 (2010). The reason for its adoption was largely for compatibility with a de facto standard that had been established by the early 2000s by Japanese telephone carriers, encoded in unused ranges with lead bytes 0xF5 to 0xF9 of the

Shift JIS Shift JIS (Shift Japanese Industrial Standards, also SJIS, MIME name Shift_JIS, known as PCK in Solaris contexts) is a character encoding for the Japanese language, originally developed by a Japanese company called ASCII Corporation in conjunctio ...

standard.

KDDI () is a Japanese telecommunications operator formed on October 1, 2000 through the merger of DDI Corp. (Daini-Denden Inc.), KDD (Kokusai Denshin Denwa) Corp. (itself a former listed state-owned enterprise privatized in 1998), and IDO Corp. It h ...

has gone much further than this, and has introduced hundreds more in the space with lead bytes 0xF3 and 0xF4.

Descriptions

Chart

Variant forms

Each emoticon has two

variants Variant may refer to: In arts and entertainment * ''Variant'' (magazine), a former British cultural magazine * Variant cover, an issue of comic books with varying cover art * ''Variant'' (novel), a novel by Robison Wells * " The Variant", 2021 e ...

: * U+FE0E (VARIATION SELECTOR-15) selects text presentation (e.g. 😊︎ 😐︎ ☹︎), * U+FE0F (VARIATION SELECTOR-16) selects emoji-style (e.g. 😊️ 😐️ ☹️). If there is no variation selector appended, the default is the emoji-style. Example:

Emoji modifiers

The Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block has 54 emoji that represent people or body parts. A set of "Emoji modifiers" are defined for emojis that represent people or body parts. These are

modifier character In ISO/IEC 646 (commonly known as ASCII) and related standards including ISO 8859 and Unicode, a graphic character is any character intended to be written, printed, or otherwise displayed in a form that can be read by humans. In other words, it i ...

s intended to define the

skin colour Human skin color ranges from the darkest brown to the lightest hues. Differences in skin color among individuals is caused by variation in pigmentation, which is the result of genetics (inherited from one's biological parents and or individ ...

to be used for the emoji. The draft document suggesting the introduction of this system for the representation of " human diversity" was submitted in 2015 by

Mark Davis Mark Davis may refer to: Entertainers *Mark Davis (talk show host), American radio talk show host * Mark Jonathan Davis (born 1965), American actor/singer and creator of Richard Cheese *Mark Davis, American bassist and founding member for the band ...

of Google and

Peter Edberg Peter may refer to: People * List of people named Peter, a list of people and fictional characters with the given name * Peter (given name) ** Saint Peter (died 60s), apostle of Jesus, leader of the early Christian Church * Peter (surname), a sur ...

of Apple Inc."The default representation of these modifier characters when used alone is as a color swatch. Whenever one of these characters immediately follows certain characters (such as WOMAN), then a font should show the sequence as a single glyph corresponding to the image for the person(s) or body part with the specified skin tone
Draft Unicode Technical Report #51 "UNICODE EMOJI"
Version 1.0 (draft 10) eds. Mark Davis (Google Inc.), Peter Edberg (Apple Inc.), 2015-05-08. Five symbol modifier characters were added with Unicode 8.0 to provide a range of skin tones for human emoji. These modifiers are called EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-1-2, , , , and (U+1F3FB–U+1F3FF): 🏻 🏼 🏽 🏾 🏿. They are based on the

Fitzpatrick scale The Fitzpatrick scale (also Fitzpatrick skin typing test; or Fitzpatrick phototyping scale) is a numerical classification schema for human skin color. It was developed in 1975 by American dermatologist Thomas B. Fitzpatrick as a way to estimate th ...

for classifying human skin color. Additional human emoji can be found in other Unicode blocks: Dingbats,

Miscellaneous Symbols Miscellaneous Symbols is a Unicode block (U+2600–U+26FF) containing glyphs representing concepts from a variety of categories: astrological, astronomical, chess, dice, musical notation, political symbols, recycling, religious symbols, Bagua, ...

Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs is a Unicode block containing meteorological and astronomical symbols, emoji characters largely for compatibility with Japanese telephone carriers' implementations of Shift JIS, and characters originally from ...

, Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs, Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A and

Transport and Map Symbols Transport and Map Symbols is a Unicode block containing transportation and map icons, largely for compatibility with Japanese telephone carriers' emoji implementations of Shift JIS, and to encode characters in the Wingdings and Wingdings 2 chara ...

History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Emoticons block:

References