📝 Unicode & The Unicode Standard

Unicode, also known as the Unicode Consortium, is a non-profit member organization responsible for recommending new emoji characters and concepts for our emoji keyboards. 

However, the recommendation of new emojis is just a small part of Unicode’s operations.

Founded in 1988, Unicode’s primary function is to maintain and update the Unicode Standard, a text encoding standard designed to support all characters and symbols from all the world's writing systems.

Since 2014, the Unicode Standard has been expanded annually, adding new characters from additional writing systems and symbol sets as well as new emojis.

The Unicode Standard consists of various code points - a unique identifier assigned to each character within the standard. Code points are written as "U+" followed by a series of hexadecimal digits, such as "U+0041" for the uppercase Latin letter "A."

Emoji characters recommended by Unicode also have code points, such as "U+1F602" for the 😂 Face with Tears of Joy.

There are also emoji sequences recommended in Unicode's Emoji Version documentation - strings of two or more code points recommended for emoji presentation and rendered as a single emoji design when implemented by vendors.

Emoji sequence types include skin tone modifier sequences, zero width joiner (ZWJ) sequences (which include gender modifiers for people emojis), and geographic flag sequences. Some examples are shown below:

• 👋🏽 Waving Hand: Medium Skin Tone (U+1F44B U+1F3FD)
• 👩‍⚕️ Woman Health Worker (U+1F469 U+200D U+2695 U+FE0F)
• 🇮🇪 Flag of Ireland (U+1F1EE U+1F1EA)

As of Unicode 16.0 published in September 2024, the standard defines 154,998 characters. 

As of Emoji 16.0, there are 3,790 emojis recommended by Unicode. This means emojis make up just a tiny fraction of the total characters in the Unicode Standard.