F*** you! Unicode 7.0 adds about 250 new Emoji, including middle finger

BY GreenBot Staff

Published 17 Jun 2014

You may not know what Unicode is, but you use it every day. In short, it’s a stard, developed by an independent body, for determining encoding the set of characters expressed in digital form. In other words, it’s a stard list of all the characters we use on computers smartphones set top boxes virtually everything digital. It tells you which charcter number is that “n with the wavy line on it”, or ñ ( every other chracter).

The Unicode Consortium just released Unicode 7.0, a major update to the stard character list. It adds 2,834 new characters, including currency symbols for the Russian ruble Azerbaijani manat lots of other things to help support more languages.

But you don’t care about that. You care about Emoji, the pictographic symbols that saturate the texts of everyone under 30. And Unicode 7.0 adds about 250 of them, including “reversed h with middle finger extended”, “prohibited sign”, “raised h with part between middle ring fingers.” Yes, you can now flip someone off tell them to live long prosper with your Emoji.

Of course, you won’t see these right away. The new characters have to be incorporated into keyboard software, which means updates to keyboard apps operating systems. And of course, the person on the receiving end has to have Unicode 7.0 support or they’ll just see some rom garbage instead of the intended characters. th 2,800+ characters to support, Unicode 7.0 support will take a little time to implement. th any luck, major OS releases expected this year (Android llipop, iOS 8.0) will support the stard, we’ll all be communicated with an even greater number of annoying pictures in time for the holidays.

The shington st has compiled a list of all the new Emoji found in the Unicode 7.0 spec.