Miscellaneous Symbols 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 ...

(U+2600–U+26FF) containing

glyph A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...

s representing concepts from a variety of categories:

astrological Astrology is a range of divinatory practices, recognized as pseudoscientific since the 18th century, that claim to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the apparent positions of celestial objects. Dif ...

astronomical Astronomy () is a natural science that studies celestial objects and phenomena. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and evolution. Objects of interest include planets, moons, stars, nebulae, galaxies ...

chess Chess is a board game for two players, called White and Black, each controlling an army of chess pieces in their color, with the objective to checkmate the opponent's king. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to disti ...

dice Dice (singular die or dice) are small, throwable objects with marked sides that can rest in multiple positions. They are used for generating random values, commonly as part of tabletop games, including dice games, board games, role-playing g ...

musical notation Music notation or musical notation is any system used to visually represent aurally perceived music played with instruments or sung by the human voice through the use of written, printed, or otherwise-produced symbols, including notation fo ...

political symbol Political symbolism is symbolism that is used to represent a political standpoint or party. Political symbols simplify and “summarize” the political structures and practices for which they stand; can connect institutions and beliefs with emot ...

recycling Recycling is the process of converting waste materials into new materials and objects. The recovery of energy from waste materials is often included in this concept. The recyclability of a material depends on its ability to reacquire the p ...

religious symbol A religious symbol is an iconic representation intended to represent a specific religion, or a specific concept within a given religion. Religious symbols have been used in the military in many countries, such as the United States military chapl ...

trigrams Trigrams are a special case of the ''n''-gram, where ''n'' is 3. They are often used in natural language processing for performing statistical analysis of texts and in cryptography for control and use of ciphers and codes. Frequency Context ...

warning sign A warning sign is a type of sign which indicates a potential hazard, obstacle, or condition requiring special attention. Some are traffic signs that indicate hazards on roads that may not be readily apparent to a driver. While warning traffi ...

s, and

weather Weather is the state of the atmosphere, describing for example the degree to which it is hot or cold, wet or dry, calm or stormy, clear or cloudy. On Earth, most weather phenomena occur in the lowest layer of the planet's atmosphere, the ...

, among others.

Tables

Compact table

Definitions

Emoji

The Miscellaneous Symbols block contains 83

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 ...

: U+2600–U+2604, U+260E, U+2611, U+2614–U+2615, U+2618, U+261D, U+2620, U+2622–U+2623, U+2626, U+262A, U+262E–U+262F, U+2638–U+263A, U+2640, U+2642, U+2648–U+2653, U+265F–U+2660, U+2663, U+2665–U+2666, U+2668, U+267B, U+267E–U+267F, U+2692–U+2697, U+2699, U+269B–U+269C, U+26A0–U+26A1, U+26A7, U+26AA–U+26AB, U+26B0–U+26B1, U+26BD–U+26BE, U+26C4–U+26C5, U+26C8, U+26CE–U+26CF, U+26D1, U+26D3–U+26D4, U+26E9–U+26EA, U+26F0–U+26F5, U+26F7–U+26FA and U+26FD. The block has 164 standardized variants defined to specify emoji-style (U+FE0F VS16) or text presentation (U+FE0E VS15) for the following 82 base characters: U+2600–U+2604, U+260E, U+2611, U+2614–U+2615, U+2618, U+261D, U+2620, U+2622–U+2623, U+2626, U+262A, U+262E–U+262F, U+2638–U+263A, U+2640, U+2642, U+2648–U+2653, U+265F–U+2660, U+2663, U+2665–U+2666, U+2668, U+267B, U+267E–U+267F, U+2692–U+2697, U+2699, U+269B–U+269C, U+26A0–U+26A1, U+26A7, U+26AA–U+26AB, U+26B0–U+26B1, U+26BD–U+26BE, U+26C4–U+26C5, U+26C8, U+26CF, U+26D1, U+26D3–U+26D4, U+26E9–U+26EA, U+26F0–U+26F5, U+26F7–U+26FA and U+26FD.

Emoji modifiers

The Miscellaneous Symbols block has two emoji that represent people or body parts. They can be modified using U+1F3FB–U+1F3FF to provide for a range of

human skin color 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 individu ...

using 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 ...

: Additional human emoji can be found in other Unicode blocks: Dingbats,

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

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 fro ...

, 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 char ...

History

In Unicode 1.0 (1991) the same block was named Miscellaneous Dingbats (not to be confused with current " Dingbats" block, which was then named "Zapf Dingbats"). The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Miscellaneous Symbols block:

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Miscellaneous Symbols (Unicode Block) Unicode blocks Unicode blocks with characters for games Computer-related introductions in 1990 Emoji