Post #3955445

2026-07-17 15:51 UTC

@Kuchenschwarte@fnordon.de "Why are emojis standardly not animated?" - a complicated question. The Unicode standard lists a code point for each emoji (and other symbols, too), as well as, roughly, its meaning (really a short name). You can see the full list below. E.g., codepoint "U+1F601" corresponds to "beaming face with smiling eyes" or 😁 . You can think of the look of that emoji on your individual platform as a kind of "font" - the platforms are free to implement the look of each emoji according to their house style. This is similar to the character "A" looking different in different newspapers, platforms, or styles. In most Western platforms emojis so far are not animated. But in many widely used Chinese platforms (WeChat and especially Weibo, for example), many emojis are animated. So I guess it's a question of style. #emojis #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html

Replies (1)

@tschfflr@fediscience.org 2026-07-17 15:59

@skyglowberlin@fediscience.org "Can emojis be removed from Unicode? Or are they there forever once they are in?" - As of now, once they're in, they're in. The code point in Unicode is then reserved for this symbol. This can be a problem because emojis are kind of open-ended (other than alphabets and many other symbol lists). And it's possible that some emojis turn out to be rarely used. I could imagine that eventually some platforms just stop supporting a certain emoji - but it's really useful to have an international encoding standard which is fully supported by most technology (as anyone who has programmed or written online text in the early 2000s can attest). That's why getting a new emoji approved has become so hard - we're basically creating a kind of tech debt for a potentially long time. Funny story - you could try creating a post now with a Unicode character from an "empty" code point in the emoji range, in the hope that it will get assigned in a later round. I've seen such a post on the old Twitter, which later was filled with all kinds of random emojis, when you look at it in a few years. #linguistics #emojis #WorldEmojiDay

Open ##3955443