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Only 31 new emoji are going to be encoded this year
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JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
A moose, a blackbird, a goose and a jellyfish are just a few of the new emoji you can expect to find on your phone later this year.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Juana, don't forget the shaking face.
SUMMERS: (Laughter).
JENNIFER DANIEL: You really could not express being shook until shake face. It also is fairly apt for those situations when you are experiencing either a literal earthquake or a metaphorical one, or perhaps you're just shaking your head back and forth.
SHAPIRO: Jennifer Daniel chairs the Emoji Subcommittee at the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit that approves new emojis. Daniel says another new entry bound to set texters hearts aflutter is the plain pink heart.
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DANIEL: The pink heart is one of those kinds of emojis that you think has already been there, surely. Surely there has been a pink heart all this time. But no, there has not until today.
SUMMERS: Really? In total, the Unicode Consortium proposed just 31 new emoji this year, 10 times fewer than the number approved just a few years ago. And Daniel says there's a reason why.
DANIEL: When Unicode first started to encode emoji, there were only about 700 concepts in your keyboard. And if you flash-forward to today, there's way over 3,000 of these tiny glyphs at your fingertips. What this means is it requires us to review proposals in a way that maybe we didn't have to do in the earlier days. The criteria for inclusion is much higher.
SHAPIRO: So how many emojis are too many, we asked?
DANIEL: When is a garden done growing?
SHAPIRO: Well, there is a tulip emoji.
SUMMERS: A rose.
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SHAPIRO: A sunflower.
SUMMERS: A seedling.
SHAPIRO: We might almost be there. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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