Just under eight years ago, we here at Emojipedia hypothesized that 2018 would be a year of emoji design convergence. Today, we look back at the major emoji updates made since early 2018, covering both design convergence and purposeful design divergence.

Given recent events in Syria, Emojipedia has received many questions regarding when the country's emoji flag will be updated to reflect its new political leadership. Here we detail the process for an emoji flag's design being updated, referencing other related cases in recent years.

Why does a site that informs you that 🍆 Eggplant means “penis” belong in a government-funded library?

Once merely a decorative set of stars indicating newness or cleanliness, the sparkles emoji has become the go-to markup for ✨emphasis✨, ✨sarcasm✨ or ✨mocking✨ on TikTok and other platforms.

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,

With the uncertain and ongoing situation in Afghanistan [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Kabul_(2021)] right now, one question that arises with consistency at times like this relates to the flag. If the flag of Afghanistan changes: what happens to the emoji? The short version is this: * Emoji

After England's football team lost the final of the European Championships last night, racist 'fans' flooded Bukayo Saka's Instagram comments with monkey emojis [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/bukayo-saka-racist-england-sancho-rashford-b1882303.html] . You know how the

Earlier this month the popular Chinese social platforms Sina Weibo and WeChat both took their annual measures to disuade any commemoration of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. These measures once again included removing select emojis from their respective emoji keyboards, such as their [蜡烛] candle design. This annual censorsip of

It's a small but persistent emoji query: one that finds new life whenever there's a new development in the "stonks" discourse: why is the upward line on 📈 Chart Increasing displayed in the seemingly-counterintuitive color red? The answer to this question is actually quite

It's long been both the most popular yet most hated face on the emoji keyboard. You already know which one I'm talking about. 😂 Face with Tears of Joy. More colloqueally known as the laughing crying emoji, this face found something so funny, a tear is being

You've heard of 🎅 Santa Claus [https://emojipedia.org/santa-claus/] and perhaps 🤶 Mrs. Claus [https://emojipedia.org/mrs-claus/], but how about 🧑‍🎄 Mx. Claus [https://emojipedia.org/mx-claus/]? As we approach the end of 2020, most major emoji vendors now support Emoji 13.0 [https://emojipedia.org/

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. Unicode’s approval of Person Feeding Baby, along with its gendered variants Woman Feeding Baby and Man Feeding Baby, is not

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 [https://emojipedia.org/unicode-12.0/]. This update

As with most things Unicode-related, emoji flags are more complicated than they may first appear. With calls in recent years for emoji representation of the Aboriginal Australian flag, Transgender flag, Brittany flag, Kurdish flag (and many more) it's worth taking a closer look at the ways that