The release that made emoji work between phones
Unicode 6.0 was published in October 2010 and is the foundation everything else rests on. Before it, emoji were carrier-specific: a smiley sent from a SoftBank phone could arrive as a broken box on a DoCoMo handset, and nothing crossed between Japan and the rest of the world at all. Unicode 6.0 merged the competing Japanese carrier sets into one platform-agnostic standard, which is the only reason emoji work across devices today.
| Released | |
|---|---|
| New emoji characters | 722 |
| Total including sequences | 722 |
| Emoji in our database | 1014 |
Roughly 1,014 of the emoji in our database still carry 6.0 as their version. More than half the emoji in everyday use come from this single release, which is why so much of the core vocabulary dates from 2010.
Unicode publishing a standard and your phone drawing the emoji are two separate events, usually months apart. These are the releases that added support.
| Platform | Added in | When |
|---|---|---|
| Apple | iOS 5 | October 2011 |
| Android 4.3 / 4.4 | 2013 | |
| Microsoft | Windows 8.1 | 2013 |
Named Word of the Year by Oxford Dictionaries in 2015, the first time a pictograph took the title.
Predates 6.0 as a character but gained colour emoji presentation through this standardisation.
Literal heat for years, then a general marker of quality. One of the most-used emoji worldwide.
Death originally. Now almost entirely used to mean something was extremely funny.
Prayer, gratitude or a high five, and the ambiguity has never been resolved.
Genuine distress and helpless laughter in equal measure.
Emphasis and sarcasm, usually wrapped around a phrase.
The default celebration emoji across almost every platform.
Watching, interest, or drawing attention to something without comment.
Agreement and emphasis, borrowed from the American grading scale.
Because 6.0 absorbed the entire existing Japanese carrier emoji vocabulary in one go. Around 1,014 of the emoji in our database carry 6.0, more than every other version combined, which is why the year 2010 appears constantly in emoji history.
Emoji were defined by individual Japanese mobile carriers, chiefly NTT DoCoMo, KDDI and SoftBank, and each used its own incompatible encoding. A message sent between networks could arrive with the pictures missing or replaced by unrelated characters. Cross-platform emoji did not meaningfully exist.
No. Shigetaka Kurita designed a 176-emoji set for NTT DoCoMo's i-mode service in 1999, and carriers had been shipping pictographs for over a decade before standardisation. Unicode 6.0 made them interoperable rather than creating them.
See what arrived most recently on our newest emoji page, check which characters people are using right now in trending emoji, or dig into the numbers in our emoji statistics.
Approval is only half the story. To see which iOS release actually put these on a phone, and when, see iOS emoji updates.