is a news editor covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
Today is World Emoji Day, and the Unicode Consortium is sharing a preview of some of the new emoji that should hit your devices early next year as part of Unicode 17.0. If you ask me, it’s a promising batch, especially the Bigfoot emoji — sorry, “hairy creature.”
The list includes these emoji, according to the Consortium:
Apple core
Ballet dancers
Distorted Face
Fight cloud
Hairy creature
Orca
Treasure chest
Trombone
Image: Unicode Consortium
I can think of some great uses of all of them – I feel like this is going to be a popular set. They’ll “likely” show up on devices in the spring of 2026, Unicode’s Erik Thompson says in an email. Yes, that’s a long ways away, but the process of making an emoji is actually pretty involved, as I’ve written about.
As part of World Emoji Day, Apple has also launched a new emoji word game that’s available with an Apple News Plus subscription. And Emojipedia has relaunched the EmojiTracker.com website to track real-time emoji use.