Eight brand new emojis are coming - but who decides which ones make the cut?

Emojipedia have released provisional designs for the eight new emojis. Credit: Emojipedia

By Olivia Mustafa, ITV News Producer

They transform our texts, decorate our social media posts and convey our most profound emotions.

There are now 3,782 emojis in use, including flags, animals, and food items. That number will soon became 3,790 - as eight new tiny icons are set to hit our keyboards next year.

Emojis have come a long way since the concept was first developed 25 years ago - and it's become easier than ever to express if we feel 😄, 😡 or 😭 with just a single character on our keyboards.

We've even seen them used by government, and religious leaders, with David Cameron's appointment as foreign secretary being announced with a "🔥", and Archbishop of Canterbury tweeting the Lord's Prayer in emoji form.

Archbishop of Canterbury tweets Lord’s Prayer in emoji

But what actually are emojis, how are they designed and who decides which ones are added?

What are they?

The word emoji comes from the Japanese 絵 (“e,” picture), 文 (“mo,” write) and 字 (“ji,” character).

They're small images that can be inserted into text to convey emotions, objects and ideas.

Where did Emojis come from?

The history of using icons to express emotions online goes back to 1982, when American computer science professor Scott Fahlman posted a colon, a hyphen and a close parenthesis on his university bulletin board:

": - )"

Japanese mobile phone company NTT Docomo included a small black heart on pagers in the mid 1990s, and later released a set of 176 emojis in 1999.

They were designed by Shigetaka Kurita, and have since been cemented as a piece of history after being added to a collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2016.

2010 saw emojis incorporated into the Unicode Standard, the universal system of encoding characters which digitises all the world's writing systems.

This happened at the request of tech companies like Apple, who developed an official emoji keyboard a year later.

What new Emojis have been announced?

Emojipedia, a reference website which documents the newest emojis and their meanings, released sample designs for eight new emojis.

They include:

  • A tired-looking face with bags under its eyes

  • A human fingerprint

  • A paint splatter

  • A root vegetable, which looks similar to a radish

  • A leafless tree

  • A harp

  • A shovel

  • The flag of Sark, an island in the English Channel

Emojipedia's provisional designs for the new additions. Credit: Emojipedia

When will they be released?

They must first be officially approved by non-profit organisation Unicode Consortium, which announces the official list of new emojis every September.

Once this happens, we will see the new designs arrive on our keyboards at some point in 2025.

How does the selection process work?

Unicode's emoji sub-committee sift through proposals to decide which new ones will be added.

Anyone can submit a proposal, as long as they follow certain guidelines.

The committee will consider whether the idea can work as a small image, if it can already be expressed with existing emojis, and if there is "substantial evidence" that a large number of people are likely to use it.

Who designs Emojis?

Every emoji has a unique numeric value called a 'codepoint', determined by Unicode.

Designers for different tech companies can then design the corresponding emojis as they choose - which is why they might look slightly different depending on whether you're viewing them on Apple, Google, Microsoft or Twitter.

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