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Rejected emoji proposals
- siva7 4y agoHalf covered by hair could be misidentified as some german dictator. PMS could also be seen as problematic in some circles.
- anigbrowl 4y agoNot without a mustache. I'm >50 and it just says 'emo kid' to me.
- justsomehnguy 4y agoU+man + U+mustache = U+man-with-mustache U+woman + U+mustache = U+woman-with-mustache U+emo-kid + U+mustache = U+oh-noes
- devstar 4y agoThere may be more on this list that I missed but I remember "Face Banging Against Wall", "Expressionless Face Half Covered by Hair", and "Face Covered with Black Mask with Eyes and Mouth Exposed" from Skype for Business. I think Microsoft even carried them forward into Teams, although they are all the way at the bottom of the emoji list.
- Lammy 4y agoAt least we’ll always have orz and ( -_\\)
- tossaway0 4y agoI would like regional flags, even if it would be endless. At some point we're going to need submenus for emoji anyway. Surprised that sunglasses with frown was never submitted.
- dahfizz 4y agoIt's less of an issue with menus as Unicode. We only have ~1 million Unicode codepoints in total. Wasting one for ever local flag would be a mistake.
- tossaway0 4y agoI didn't know that. That said, considering that adopting Unicode was a decision in and of itself, would expanding that space really be such a burden? I'm also now surprised to see that Wales and Scotland get a flag but Northern Ireland does not. Aren't they on the same standing? I always thought it followed UN membership but that Wales and Scotland got an exception. I know Palestine and Kosovo have emojis also. Are there any UN full member states without an emoji?
- mcdonje 4y ago>would expanding that space really be such a burden? It would require dropping UTF-16, which is the limiting factor. That, or defining planes that aren't available to all encodings. Don't hold your breath. I don't know who is using UTF-16 or UTF-32. It seems like most of the world has adopted UTF-8. So, maybe one day UTF-16 and UTF-32 will be dropped and more planes will be defined. That's a big maybe. If it happens at all, it's decades away. There are no conversations to do so that I'm aware of. There are currently 10 planes that are completely unassigned, and there are no current proposals to put anything on them. The Unicode Consortium is very deliberate. Those planes will probably be empty for a long time. And while there are empty planes, they won't be talks about adding new ones. That's my impression. I keep up a bit, but I'm unaffiliated.
- colejohnson66 4y ago> I don't know who is using UTF-16 or UTF-32. Java, JavaScript, Win32's "wide" API, C#, and many more. As for actual file storage, UTF-8 is indeed the most common, but UTF-16 still lingers on.
- evanb 4y ago
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y agoI thought the period related ones were weird since they were proposed by Svenska Cellulosa AB. But on second thought, they probably wanted to use the emojis to market paper products
- bXVsbGVy 4y agoI find fascinating that many of those were rejected, but "Pregnant man" and male bride were approved. https://emojipedia.org/pregnant-man/ https://emojipedia.org/pregnant-man/ https://emojiguide.com/people-body/man-with-veil/ https://emojiguide.com/people-body/man-with-veil/
- wsc981 4y ago[flagged]
- calvinmorrison 4y agoNo Male Child Breastfeeding An Adult Male yet? Surely endless combinations are the goal right?
- chrismorgan 4y agoAlthough footnotes 4 and 5 say “This was replaced with [emoji] during the approval process.”, this shouldn’t be taken as that it was accepted in any way. Look at what it was replaced with: MAN, ZERO WIDTH JOINER, BABY BOTTLE. That is, bottle-feeding, which is a completely different thing and much more realistic. So, now you have four relevant Recommended for General Interchange emoji: breast-feeding, and {person,woman,man} feeding baby. Well, and variants with skin tone modifiers, if you count those distinctly. With the recommendation that the baby’s head be hidden, the skin tone only applying to the feeder (https://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Multi_Person_Groupings https://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Multi_Person_Groupings).
- ender341341 4y agoMy only mildly knowledgeable guess would be that those are more "pregnant person" and as part of the work to add gender modifiers to emojis they just added male/female versions of a whole block that happened to include those. Would definitely love if the linked chart had a reason for rejection column
- bXVsbGVy 4y agoThe "Pregnant Person" is another, different, variant! https://emojipedia.org/pregnant-person/ https://emojipedia.org/pregnant-person/ https://emojipedia.org/pregnant-man/ https://emojipedia.org/pregnant-man/ https://emojipedia.org/pregnant-woman/ https://emojipedia.org/pregnant-woman/
- pfp 4y agoI guess I should feel relieved that I don't at least have my work discussions littered with these ones. But they're not too different from the set of infantilizing pictograms that did make their way into the standard & that grown-ups are now expected to deal with.
- kilroy123 4y agoReally? We use slack and all staff has access to add new emojis. You can just imagine how that would turn out...
- pfp 4y agoWell, at least then you could think of the addons as local slang. It's still unnecessary, but limited to the social circle at your workplace. I didn't have a huge beef with the proprietary emojis on old skool Skype and MSN, TBH - they were technically bound to those platforms, and the platforms mostly to private social spheres where they'd form part of the local slang. (And where Skype was used at work in the 00's, people actually refrained from them and acted in a businesslike manner). Modern day emojis being part of unicode implies that they're somehow universally understood, and that it's fine to sprinkle them around in any kind of social context. Quite horrifying, really.
- LeanderK 4y ago> Modern day emojis being part of unicode implies that they're somehow universally understood, and that it's fine to sprinkle them around in any kind of social context. Quite horrifying, really. This just reads a bit like someone older ranting at the younger generation being glued to their smartphone all the time. Modern day emojis are part of our writing system. I use them all the time, from Slack to WhatsApp. They are universally understood, to a limit of course, but I see everybody else using them too and no "office drama" because Alice misunderstood the emoji Bob was using. They make it easier for me to express my emotions and they are as naturally as speaking. There's nothing extraordinarily horrifying really.
- jpk 4y ago
- calvinmorrison 4y agoYes, I have been missing Yogurt for a very long time. However, it's not until this moment I realized how often I say "Modern Pentathlon" and could use a emoji for it
- chasing 4y agoI hope you're not using such salty language around children!
- gkoberger 4y agoDefinitely click on the "Document" links for each emoji. I spent about a half hour reading through them and found them incredibly fascinating. A lot advocate for why something is important (for example, it's easy to laugh at a PMS emoji, but it's hard to disagree with "Currently, although menstruation is a core part of being a woman, it is felt to impose significant limitations on women when influenced by negative societal beliefs and taboos."). Others are longer docs where many included proposals are now valid emojis, and it's interesting to think how some were picked and others weren't.
- LaundroMat 4y agoThe author of the PMS emoji proposal is Svenska Cellulosa AB, a forest industry company that's also in paper hygiene products. I see the SCA logo a lot in public bathrooms (e.g. paper towels). I suspect their marketing team was brooding on something.
- geoduck14 4y ago>I suspect their marketing team was brooding on something. Sure. Or, perhaps, they were simply well positioned to understand why that emoji was impactful
- miiiiiike 4y agoI like the bloated balloon one and a period/pre-period emojis would be good. A few women in my life (managers/directors/executives) are terrified to talk about their periods because it could be used against them. I'm going to risk turning this into one of those "Normalize <XYZ>" tweets.. But cramps, bloating, irritability, pain, any number of other things. I want a status emoji for headaches and "didn't sleep well". Something that says lay off the knucklehead stuff today/for a few hours. Period and pre-period ones would be good too. If I need to I don't hesitate to start meetings with: "I had 5 hours of sleep so let's see how this goes." Let people talk about why they feel they way they feel. Three rejected period proposals. Just make one. Let’s do one for prostates too. I have one uncle who died of prostate cancer and another one who won’t get a prostate exam. I don't even have a walnut emoji to throw at him in the meantime.
- Swizec 4y agoI would love a “Hi I’ve been in meetings for 5 hours and forgot to eat” emoji. But instead I have to be double extra cautious I don’t come off as short or mean when people have boneheaded ideas.
- joshspankit 4y agoWould you be open to a generic “hangry” emoji?
- speed_spread 4y agoIf you accept hangry then we have to go back and also accept that fantastic angry poo, for balance.
- jenadine 4y agoNote that a period emoji was approved in 2019 https://emojipedia.org/drop-of-blood/ https://emojipedia.org/drop-of-blood/
- potamic 4y agoThe problem with normalising things is that it tends to become an expectation. An environment where people are open about their personal well being is challenging for someone who needs privacy. The one who takes unexplained time off risks appearing insincere. I feel it's more inclusive to insist on not discussing personal situations in public. If you need time off, just take time off. Every person is different and will have their own needs and situations. I don't need to know why and even if I did, it is has zero bearing on the matter, unless we share a personal relationship.
- anigbrowl 4y agoThe idea that unicode proposals have to be submitted to the unicode consortium is trash. It's be better to declare parts of the unicode standard open access (like the 2.4GHz wifi band) and just let people exchange/trade emoji sets.
- bXVsbGVy 4y agoThere are some code points ranges that aren't reserved by Unicode.
- JellyBeanThief 4y agoAlready done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas
- graypegg 4y agoI’m pretty sure the core tenant of Unicode is to ensure universal document readability . Having a private use area is useful in theory, but will make communication difficult. I remember when iOS folks were complaining about their heart emoji showing up as a hairy heart on android phones! “[Unicode] brings order to a chaotic state of affairs that has made it difficult to exchange text files internationally.“ [0] [0] https://unicode.org/standard/principles.html https://unicode.org/standard/principles.html
- frosted-flakes 4y agotenet
- crazygringo 4y agoWho is going to decide which emoji sets get assigned to which "open access" part? And that sets don't conflict? If it's not the Unicode Consortium who decides, well somebody has to. And what is my phone supposed to display when it gets an emoji from one of these sets? Is it supposed to have a URL that it downloads them from or something? The whole point of Unicode is to be a standard of communication. So it's hard to see how a free-for-all of characters or emoji is still a standard at all.
- gardenhedge 4y agoIt sucks that emojis everywhere are all the same. I miss the old days.
- NayamAmarshe 4y agoNot on Telegram and Discord. They have custom emojis.
- mouse_ 4y agoDiscord handles emojis better than any other chat platform I've used; I think this is one of the main reasons people like to use it. Telegram's up there with Skype for being one of the absolute worst at handling them. I type :flushed: and it gives me smiling blushing face instead of :flushed:. I type :o (which has always meant surprised pikachu face, since before the surprised pikachu face was even a meme) and it gives me fearful face emoji. WHY? I respond with just an emoji, and it puts a huge distracting gimmicky animated emoji into the chat. Sure I can just disable them on my end, but other users are still going to see them as the default, which can lead to miscommunication, and also, I just don't want to be seen like that. Discord simply never steps on my toes like that, it works as intended. So many chat clients over the years have died by failing to understand that less is more.
- insomagent 4y agoIt's also a genius monetization strategy, having something as superficial as custom emoji being one of the main value propositions of Discord Nitro.
- NayamAmarshe 4y agoTelegram's custom emojis are fairly recent. They've not yet implemented super deep contextual recommendation, but I appreciate the little convenient things Telegram has. For example, writing 'stonks' on Telegram would recommend you the statistics chart emoji. Or typing 'haha' would suggest relevant emojis. I don't remember discord doing that (I stopped using it long ago). Also, Telegram's sticker support is unmatched. Not a single app even comes close to it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nadow 4y agono matter how you slice it, the Jain Svastika is just not a good emoji idea.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoIt already exists in the CJK glyphs. A historic misappropriation shouldn't penalize the people who justifiably have a right to it.
- wlonkly 4y agoPoke around on Google Maps in Kyoto, you'll see _lots_ of swastikas representing temples. It's definitely jarring at first for Western sensibilities, but from India east to the Pacific, people kept using the swastika for what it meant before the Nazis. (And _since_ they use it -- especially symbolically to mean "temple"! -- it needs to be represented in Unicode.)
- jay-barronville 4y agoIt’s quite upsetting to know we had to opportunity to get a Frowning Pile of Poo emoji and it was rejected! The current poo emoji is too happy!
- Tao3300 4y agoIndeed, anyone with an infant knows bowel movements run the entire emotional gamut. Everything from the sad face to the party hat, from the exploding head to the dollar sign eyes.
- jay-barronville 4y agoYou can't bring dollar signs into this and not explain further — that's not right and you know it! Haha.
- fanf2 4y agopile of poo ZWJ frowny face pile of poo ZWJ party hat
- pyuser583 4y agoWould have been nice if they did US state flags.
- skissane 4y agoThe US is far from the only country in which states/provinces/regions/etc have their own flags. Australia's six states (and its two self-governing mainland territories) each have their own flag. Canada's ten provinces and three territories have flags too. Mexico has 31 states, but only 7 have official flags. Germany has 16 states, all of which have a flag. Austria has 9 states, which all have flags. Switzerland has 26 cantons, all of which have flags too. The list goes on and on. Doing it for just one country is biased, but doing it for all is such a gigantic project, probably biting off more than anyone could chew.
- pyuser583 4y agoEngland, Scotland, and Wales all have Unicode flags. So do British Overseas territories (e.g UK Virgin Islands) and crown dependencies (e.g. Jersey). As do US Territories (e.g. Puerto Rico). America had a much stronger flag culture than, say, Jersey. We see local and state flags flown at private residences. I’d certainly use my state if it was in Unicode.
- skissane 4y ago> England, Scotland, and Wales all have Unicode flags. So do British Overseas territories (e.g UK Virgin Islands) and crown dependencies (e.g. Jersey). As do US Territories (e.g. Puerto Rico). With the exception of England, Scotland and Wales, all of that’s just due to following ISO 3166-1, which covers both countries and significant external territories; you might say that it treats the layer as if they were in some sense similar to the former. Sticking to 3166-1 excuses the Unicode Consortium from getting involved in the politically fraught question of which countries to recognise. National subdivisions such as the countries of the UK or the states of the US are ISO 3166-2. 3166-2 flags, including US state ones, are in Unicode, but they are non-RGI-meaning vendors are permitted to implement them, but neither required nor recommended to do so, and users should not expect them to be supported except on specific platforms or configurations. What about England, Scotland and Wales? I think there is a justification for that inconsistency: they are considered to be “countries” (including by 3166-2), even if “countries-within-a-country”. This is not purely a linguistic thing-some international sporting competitions treat them as separate countries, and they have lengthy histories of independence. By contrast, almost nobody considers US states to be “countries”, most never have been independent countries, and even the few of those who have been independent have almost all been so briefly (a few decades at most) rather than for many centuries. Hawaii arguably comes closest to qualifying, but very few Americans would call its contemporary incarnation a “country”. And note that Northern Ireland’s flag is non-RGI, but 3166-2 does not officially classify it as a “country”, and calling it that is politically extremely controversial (it appeals to some Unionists/Loyalists, but offends Nationalists/Republicans.)
- donatj 4y agoI feel like the entire emoji block should be made part of the supplementary/private use or similar. Leave what gets implemented up to Microsoft/ Apple/ Google to agree on. It's fallen completely out of scope of unicode's purpose of documenting used symbols and into a sort of editorialized control of what can cannot be said.
- joshspankit 4y agoAnd also in to a way for companies to encourage users to upgrade their OS
- slig 4y agoExactly. There's no reason for a font to be tied to a specific OS version.
- Aerroon 4y agoI still don't understand how so many people are in favor of this whole emoji system being a part of unicode. Most people I interact with seem to end up using application specific emojis anyway. Aren't people afraid that if there's too much stuff in a standard then people will stop using the standard?
- mijamo 4y agoI got one love emojis and think it was one of the best decisions to include them in Unicode. I don't buy that you can have tens of thousands of weird human scripts but then a few icons representing non verbal communication is suddenly "too much". Sure a system might not support everything but the same is true for the regular text scripts. And then it means I can include emojis in my she'll script, slack messages, copy paste around, and it just works. I love it!
- Aerroon 4y agoThe problem is that the emojis appear different in different applications/devices. They're different enough that it can change the meaning of what you see, which means that people end up using it in an application-specific way. But we already had application specific emoticons. They worked well, they work so well, that even with emojis in Unicode we still use application specific ones instead. Also, the default ones seem to always be ugly. Also also, the "weird human scripts" generally have a fairly long history of use.
- 4rt 4y agothere's still no leek / scallion emoji despite the family being the 2nd most used vegetable in SEA cooking.
- mprime1 4y agoYou must be a Scallion Justice Warrior?
- labster 4y agoThe top 1% of the vegetables gets 99% of the veggie emoji.
- wizofaus 4y agoSpinach is one of the most consumed veggies globally (#8 or #9) and has no emoji. And WhatsApp at least has no emoji results for "chili"/"chilli" - you have to search for "pepper". But there's no emoji for ground pepper!
- angio 4y agoI noticed proposals use google/bing search results (in english) to show support for an emoji. If they used multiple languages to show popularity (at least english, spanish, french, and mandarin) it would look different. In general emoji are very us-centric, for example the police car emoji doesn't look like a police car to many cultures.
- 31337Logic 4y ago[flagged]
- dietr1ch 4y agoThere's no donkey or dumbass emoji :(
- singularity2001 4y agouse the egyptian hieroglyph
- pwdisswordfishc 4y agoU+1FACF
- jez 4y agoOne of the custom emoji I use the most is a picture of a judge’s gavel mid-swing. It’s useful to convey the finality of a decision that’s been made. There’s a judge emoji where the judge is holding a gavel, but it doesn’t quite work the same way. If I were going to ask the committee for one emoji, this would be it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fijiaarone 4y agoI thought I’d never felt dumber then after seeing that list of emojis. Then I started reading the comments.
- toastal 4y agoI like that they have stopped accepting flag proposals. They don't have any business trying to play geopolitics and they don't want to either, but as a result these legacy symbol must stay there for compatibility and new nations or those that didn't make the cut get no representation. We should use these flags a lot less anyhow—especially for language indicators.
- matthewmacleod 4y agoTo clarify, new national flags will still be added to the standard in line with changes to ISO 3166. So new countries will (as I understand it) still receive flags. This seems like a reasonable compromise, though it’s not without its risks either. But I agree generally that the addition of flags was, in retrospect, an unfortunate outcome.
- maeil 4y agoNot sure how this is a compromise by any means as it still means abiding by some arbiter to decide who gets to be a country and who doesn't. Outsourcing the arbitration to the ISO doesn't make much of a difference.
- smugma 4y agoApple removed flags from macOS 12.4 Monterey, replacing them with ISO2A characters
- toastal 4y agoI did not know this, and it's a really cool fact.
- bentobean 4y agoWe need a dumpster fire emoji.
- 1101010010 4y agoI have made a conscious commitment to stop all use of emojis. They seem innocent enough, but ultimately they're debasing language and limiting the range of free expression. For example, in 2018, most major platforms changed their revolver emojis to water gun icons, in an apparent attempt to "do something" about gun violence. This would be a laughable proposition if it didn't border on dystopian. We should not allow these corrupt companies and consortiums to dictate our capabilities of conveying ourselves based on their political ideologies. Orwell understood well vagueness and use of euphemisms as powerful tools of oppressing political opposition, and wrote beautifully of it in Politics and the English Language (1946).
- Larrikin 4y agoWhat would be the emoji equivalent of old man shaking fist at cloud?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- swatcoder 4y ago> They seem innocent enough, but ultimately they're debasing language and limiting the range of free expression. Whatever they do, it’s not that. Emojis allow for multivalence and useful ambiguity in ways that few words still have left in them. From the perspectives of both communication and poetry, they’re a major boon to what’s now possible in written form. Rage all you want, though. Talking about them like this helps sharpen our understanding of what they actually do.
- jerojero 4y agoIn simple emoji fashion, I would use the "rolling eyes" emoji to express my discontent with your post.
- 1101010010 4y agoDo you think that would be more or less respectful than using your words to communicate in polite discourse?
- chaps 4y agoWow. The rejected "east coast" emoji is.... it's a gang sign.
- bloodyplonker22 4y ago[flagged]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mixmastamyk 4y agoI really liked the yahoo messenger icons back in the day, they were useful and cute. Especially the ones with hand gestures like "bring it on", dancing, call me, and giggle with the eyelashes. Wish whoever was the designer behind them could be given a few code points. :-) https://www.emoticonr.com/emoticons/yahoo https://www.emoticonr.com/emoticons/yahoo
- andsoitis 4y agomany of these are pictures rather than emoji
- WirelessGigabit 4y agoI miss the hiker emoji. I swear I saw it.