New phone emoji will allow you to the flip the bird at unsuspecting friends

If you use instant messaging, chances are you use emoji characters every day. But how often have you stopped to think about where they come from? As it turns out, there’s an organisation responsible for their regulation and it’s just approved a whole load of new characters, including one that allows you to flip a middle finger at whoever you’re talking to.

In an official blogpost, the Unicode Consortium — which is responsible for regulating how text appears across different platforms — says that the latest version of Unicode comes with 2 834 new characters.

According to the organisation, those new characters include “the new currency symbols for the Russian ruble and Azerbaijani manat, approximately 250 emoji (pictographic symbols), many other symbols, and 23 new lesser-used and historic scripts”.

Many of the new characters, it adds, have been used for a pretty long time in the Wingdings and Webdings fonts.

While everyone’s bound to be happy that they can flip the bird at their friends or accurately type about Russian currency issues, there are still question marks around the emoji used to represent people.

The vast majority of people represented in emoji are white, something that Apple’s apparently been working with the consortium on.

A glance at the full list of new characters, as listed by emojipedia however, shows that the vast majority of the new characters are of objects rather than people.

Image: Intel Free Press via Flickr.