You’ll be able to call someone a liar, shrug, and call in sick to work without typing a single word, if a proposed set of emojis from the international body that governs them gets final approval next year.
The lying face, shruggie, nauseated, and sneezing emoji are among 67 proposed additions, released in an updated list last week, from the non-profit Unicode Consortium.
The latest list includes a cowboy, a whiskey tumbler, and a wilting rose. But before you start gleefully anticipating your Wild West/”Beauty and the Beast” crossover emoji fanfic opportunities, keep in mind that it can take a long time for an emoji proposal to actually make it on to a phone or computer.
The Unicode Consortium won’t consider the current list until May of next year, for release in June. But even if it’s approved, that doesn’t mean that your Android or iPhone will immediately make the new emoji available.
The Unicode standard simply establishes a baseline so that, among other things, emoji across different platforms can remain compatible with each other. Beyond that, each company comes up with its own design for the emoji, choosing whether or not to support it on their individual platforms.
That can lead to a lot of variation, both visually and time-wise, in the roll-out of new emoji. It took more than a year for Microsoft to start supporting the middle finger emoji after Unicode approved it.
New emoji
For a list of proposed emoji, visit www.heraldnet.com/life.
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