The Unicode Consortium announced Monday that version 7.0 of the Unicode Standard is now available, which means users now have around 250 cool, new emojis to choose from when they're running out of words to express what they want to express.
Emojis are pictographic symbols originally developed in Japan that are now widely adopted all over the world for their ability to help users communicate beyond the limitations of simple words. They range from simple pictographs, such as "film frames" to indicate that a user is watching a movie or a "slightly smiling face" to signify all sorts of emotions. The new additions include a few other eye-catchers, such as a "soft shell floppy disk" as a salute to older times, a "man in business suit levitating" to represent whatever situation Unicode was thinking of, and, yes, a "reversed hand with middle finger extended" for users who like flipping the bird when they're pissed.
"Most of the new emoji characters derive from characters in long-standing and widespread use in Wingdings and Webdings fonts," writes Unicode in a blog post.
The new Unicode Standard also includes more than 2,000 other characters to add to the existing list of more than 110,000 characters defined in Unicode 6.3, including currency symbols such as symbols for the Russian ruble and the Azerbaijani manat, 23 "lesser-used and historic scripts" and wider support for North American, African and Asian languages, such as Indian and Chinese.
Unicode has also made progress when it comes to using more racially diverse ethnicities in emojis, including new symbols such as a "sideways black left pointing index," where index is taken to mean the index finger, and "black up pointing backhand index." A few critics have mentioned that a few black fingers are not enough to represent ethnic diversity, saying that the majority of people emojis are still of the Caucasian race.
Still, the inclusion of new emojis takes a matter of time and the Unicode Consortium might be holding off on racially diverse skin tones and faces until it is ready. Unicode has also addressed this issue in its forums.
"Unicode does not require a particular racial or ethnic appearance -- or, for that matter, a particular hairstyle: bald or hirsute. However, because there are concerns regarding the emoji characters for people, proposals are being developed by Unicode Consortium members to provide more diversity," Unicode says.
Users who are excited to use the new emojis in the latest Unicode version have to wait for their providers to offer support for Unicode 7.0. Earlier this year, Apple announced that it will be introducing more ethnically diverse emojis, but the beta version of iOS 8 still shows the same emojis carried over from iOS 7. Google and Microsoft are also part of the Unicode Consortium, so we only have a little while to wait before we'll start seeing the middle finger popping up across iOS, Android and Windows Phone devices.
