Rolling on the floor laughing, and the first pride flag
Unicode 9.0 was published in June 2016 with 72 new emoji. It gave the internet ๐คฃ, which went on to outrank ๐ in several platform usage reports, and it added the avocado ๐ฅ at the precise moment avocado toast became a cultural shorthand. The rainbow flag ๐ณ๏ธโ๐ was created as a sequence around this period, the first pride representation in the standard.
| Released | |
|---|---|
| New emoji characters | 72 |
| Total including sequences | 72 |
| Emoji in our database | 75 |
This release also added gender variants for several profession emoji, which began the push toward equal representation that accelerated through 11.0 and 12.0.
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 10.2 | December 2016 |
| Android 7.0 Nougat | August 2016 | |
| Samsung | Experience 8.0 | 2017 |
Has overtaken ๐ in usage on several platforms since release.
Arrived exactly as avocado toast became a generational punchline.
One of the most requested food emoji of the preceding years.
Scepticism far more often than genuine thought.
Warmth and comfort, and later the logo of a well-known AI company.
Exasperation, and one of the clearest gestures in the whole set.
Indifference and resignation. Extremely heavily used.
Part of a wider animal expansion.
Later inseparable from a certain children's song.
France, breakfast, and bakery accounts.
Actually from Unicode 8.0, but shipped to most users alongside this set.
Automation, bots, and anything mechanical.
On several platforms it has overtaken it. ๐คฃ was added in Unicode 9.0 in June 2016 and grew steadily, partly because ๐ came to be seen as the choice of an older generation. Both still rank in the global top ten.
๐ณ๏ธโ๐ is a ZWJ sequence combining the white flag with the rainbow, created around the Emoji 4.0 period in 2016. Because it is a sequence, many datasets report its version as 6.0, inheriting it from the base white flag character.
Seventy-two, published in June 2016. Google shipped them in Android 7.0 Nougat that August, ahead of Apple's iOS 10.2 in December.
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.