What's New In Unicode 16.0

Today the latest emoji list will be released by the Unicode Consortium, with additions including a harp, a shovel, a splatter symbol, and a face with bags under its eyes.

Keith Broni

• 6 min read
What's New In Unicode 16.0

Today the latest emoji list will be released by the Unicode Consortium, with additions including a harp, a shovel, a splatter symbol, and a face with bags under its eyes.

The release of version 16.0 of the Unicode Standard today, 10 September, formalizes what has until now been only a draft release of new emojis and several thousand additional non-emoji characters.

🆕 New Emojis

No changes have been made to the draft emoji list since we here at Emojipedia previewed the Emoji 16.0 draft list on July 17, aka World Emoji Day.

This means eight new emojis will begin to appear across our various digital devices over the next few months and throughout 2025.

Above: Emojipedia Sample Images for Emoji 16.0. Image: Emojipedia

These emojis are:

All of these new emojis bar the 🇨🇶 Flag: Sark are included within both Unicode 16.0 and Emoji 16.0.

Above: the new emojis within Unicode 16.0's Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A documentation.

The distinction between Unicode 16.0 and Emoji 16.0 is that the latter includes sequences where two or more code points can be combined to display a single emoji, while the former only includes the list of standalone emoji codepoints.

The 🇨🇶 Flag: Sark is included in Emoji 16.0 but not Unicode 16.0 because it is a flag sequence combining the existing characters of 🇨 Regional Indicator Symbol Letter C and 🇶 Regional Indicator Symbol Letter Q. 

Additionally, the 🇨🇶 Flag: Sark has been recommended in spite of the fact that Unicode had previously announced that it would no longer be accepting proposals for "flag emoji of any category" back in March of 2022.

Despite the recommendation of 🇨🇶 Flag: Sark in Emoji 16.0, this policy remains in force.

At the time of this policy's announcement, Unicode did highlight how further national/regional flags could come into existence:

The Unicode Consortium isn’t in the business of determining what is a country and what isn’t. That’s when the Consortium chose ISO 3166-1 alpha 2 as the source for valid country designations. ISO 3166 is a widely-accepted standard, and this particular mechanism represents each country with 2 letters, such as “US” (For United States), “FR” (France), or “CN” (China).

Sark received an “exceptionally reserved” ISO 3166 code of CQ within ISO 3166-1, paving the way for it to receive its own emoji flag recommended for general interchange (RGI) without the need for a formal proposal.

With the formal recommendation of Emoji 16.0 today, there are now a total of 3,790 emojis recommended by Unicode for general interchange across our digital devices.

It also means our World Emoji Awards 2024 Most Anticipated emoji - the 🫩 Face with Bags Under Eyes - will officially be making its way to our devices over the next year or so.

Browse Unicode 16.0 on Emojipedia or see the Unicode 16.0.0 release notes provided by the Unicode Consortium.

🧮 New Characters?

The Unicode Consortium is the non-profit standards body responsible for the Unicode Standard. Voting members include Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

Unicode 16.0 includes a total of 5,185 new characters, of which 7 are brand-new emoji code points discussed above.

This brings the total number of characters encoded within Unicode to 154,998.

Unicode 16.0 adds 5185 characters, for a total of 154,998 characters. The new additions include seven new scripts.

As is evident by the numbers above, the majority of the new characters within Unicode 16.0 are not emojis.

In fact, the vast majority of characters in the Unicode Standard are not emojis, but other digital characters and symbols.

Emoji updates are of course given priority here at Emojipedia, but it's worth taking a moment to also highlight the other new characters approved in today's Unicode 16.0 release.

The seven new scripts in question are:

There are also 3,995 additional Egyptian Hieroglyphs, some of which are shown below.

Above: hieroglyphs from the encoding proposal. (Image: Michel Suignard)

This update includes over 700 symbols from legacy computing environments, including some early video game systems. Several are these are shown below.

Above: new symbols from legacy computing environments within Unicode 16.0documentation.

Lastly, Unicode 16.0 also provides Japanese “Moji Jōhō Kiban” source references for over 36,000 existing CJK Unified Ideographs.

Now that the code points for Unicode 16.0 are stable, these remain in place forever.

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🗓️ Emoji Release Schedule

The release of Unicode 16.0 and Emoji 16.0sponsors does not mean users can immediately access or use any new emoji from this list.

What today's release from the Unicode Consortium does indicate is when major vendors such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, or Samsung can implement these new emojis in their software.

Expect to see some companies come out with early emoji support in late 2024, and the majority of updates to take place in the first half of 2025.

In fact, Google has already previewed its support for Emoji 16.0 within both their Noto Color Emoji and Noto Emoji font site pages. Read more about that here.

Above: Google's Noto Color Emoji designs for the new emojis that were recommended today as part of Emoji 16.0.

Based on last year's release schedule, here is our estimate for when you can expect to see Emoji 16.0 emojis appear across different devices and platforms:

  • September 2024: Google previews its designs via its Noto Color Emoji and Noto Emoji font site pages.
  • October 2024: Samsung will likely debut its support in a One UI update
  • January / February 2025: WhatsApp will release their Emoji 16.0 for Android devices
  • Early 2025: Google will begin to progressively support Emoji 16.0 across their different platforms (e.g. Chromebook, YouTube)
  • March 2025: Google will provide support for Android devices
  • March / April 2025: Apple will release their Emoji 16.0 support via iOS 18.4
  • Summer 2025: Facebook, including Messenger (though support for Emoji 15.1 has yet to be provided)
  • Summer / Fall 2025: Microsoft via a major Windows 11

📋 Support Unicode

The Unicode Consortium is a small non-profit organization, which is funded primarily through membership fees and donations.

One means through which Unicode obtains additional funding is their Adopt A Character program, through which either a person or an organization can be listed as a sponsor of an emoji or, indeed, any other character within Unicode.

In fact, more than 151,700 characters can be adopted.

Adopting a character helps the non-profit Unicode Consortium in its goal to support the world’s languages and of course, continue to encode new emojis within the Unicode Standard.

All sponsors are acknowledged in Sponsors of Adopted Characters and Unicode's public Twitter feed and will receive a custom digital badge for their character.