Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs 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 meteorological and astronomical symbols,

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 ...

characters largely for compatibility with Japanese telephone carriers' implementations of

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 ...

, and characters originally from the

Wingdings Wingdings is a series of dingbat fonts that render letters as a variety of symbols. They were originally developed in 1990 by Microsoft by combining glyphs from Lucida Icons, Arrows, and Stars licensed from Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. Ce ...

and

Webdings Webdings is a TrueType dingbat typeface developed in 1997. It was initially distributed with Internet Explorer 4.0, then as part of Core fonts for the Web, and is included in all versions of Microsoft Windows since Windows 98. All of the picto ...

fonts found in

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

Emoji

The block contains 637

and has 312 standardized variants defined to specify emoji-style (U+FE0F VS16) or text presentation (U+FE0E VS15) for 156 base characters.

Emoji modifiers

The Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block has 54 emoji that represent people or body parts. For these, a set of "Emoji modifiers" are defined. 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, 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 ...

(but conflating the two lightest skin types into one category): :U+1F3FB EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-1-2 :U+1F3FC EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-3 :U+1F3FD EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-4 :U+1F3FE EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-5 :U+1F3FF EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-6 The draft document suggesting the introduction of this system for the representation of " human diversity" was submitted in August 2014 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. and was adopted in Unicode version 8.0 (June 2015). It was the result of lobbying by Katrina Parrott, whose daughter came up with the idea after being unable to send emojis that looked like her.

Table of emojis with modifiers

The following table shows the full combinations of the "human emoji" characters with each of the five modifiers, which should display each character in each of the five skin tones provided a suitable font is installed on the system and the rendering software is capable of handling modifier characters, platforms without emoji modifier support may show as boxes: 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 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, ...

, 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 ...

Chart

History

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

References

{{reflist Unicode blocks Emoji