What do broccoli, elves, mind-blown, T-Rex, the flag of Scotland and pretzels have in common?

They are all candidates for upcoming emojis. Unicode, the governing body for emojis, has released 69 new emojis for draft status. The biggest features of this new batch are gender variations and skin tone modifiers. These new emojis are planned for release by June 2017.

Emojis are often used in mobile messaging. Apple released new emojis for iOS 10.2 last December 2016.

69 New Emojis

The latest batch of emojis called Emoji 5.0 has been unveiled by Emojipedia for Unicode 10. All in all, there will be 69 emojis that people can soon use in messengers, social media, and emails.

The emojis have been rendered in "Apple-like style" to visualize how the concepts will look like once final. These of course are still in draft status, so these are still subject to change.

Emojis (or emoticons) are pictures used to convey emotions and other expressions. In other words, they are pictographs. It first gained use in Japan by DoCoMo mobile operators. Since then, with the advent of social media and mobile messaging, the emojis have become part of everyday communication.

The Category Breakdown

The categories are varied. The first one is Human Faces showing emotions and expressions like:

• Grinning Face with Star Eyes or Wow Face
• Face with One Eyebrow Raised or Colbert
• Shocked Face with Exploding Head or Mind Blown
• Grinning Face with One Large and One Small Eye or Crazy Eyes
• Serious Face with Symbols Covering Mouth or Cursing
• Face With Open Mouth Vomiting or Throwing Up
• Face with Finger Covering Closed Lips or Hush/ STFU
• Smiling Face with Smiling Eyes and Hand Covering Mouth
• Face With Monocle