Jane Solomon

Why does a site that informs you that 🍆 Eggplant means “penis” belong in a government funded library? In 2017 the Library of Congress started archiving Emojipedia as part of their new Web Cultures Web Archive, housed in the American Folklife Center. Anyone unfamiliar with this archive might be surprised to

Two new emojis have been welcomed into the world: Pregnant Man and Pregnant Person. They join 🤰 Pregnant Woman, which has been an emoji since 2016. Released this week by the Unicode Consortium as part of Emoji 14.0, the new pregnancy options may be used for representation by trans men,

The pandemic may have warped our collective sense of time, but time has always been strange in the emoji world. Starting around April 2020, a cluster of articles popped up exploring the science of how time feels meaningless during a pandemic. According to the New York Times, Google saw an

In fall 2020, a new baby is coming to town. That baby is the swaddled and bottlefed bundle in Person Feeding Baby, and that town is your emoji keyboard. Above: Person, woman, and man bottle feeding baby. Images: Google.Unicode’s approval of Person Feeding Baby, along with its gendered

Spelling out words with emojis is not the most typical use of these tiny images, but it is fascinating. On September 24, 2019, Lizzo tweeted a peach emoji. This is an extremely common emoji for her to use. In fact, in 2017 the singer/rapper/songwriter/flautist, who often twerks

When it comes to emojis and punctuation, the rules are still up in the air. In absence of any formal conventions, emojis’ place alongside traditional punctuation often comes down to a rubric of subjective user intuition. Additionally emojis are being used as punctuation in a variety of ways, sometimes to

One new emoji added in 2019 was quickly deemed to represent a small penis, but it's so much more than that. In March 2019 the Unicode Consortium released over 60 new emoji code points as part of Unicode 12.0. This update featured a wide-ranging new set of emojis including