Blog / Deep Dives
Deep Dives
One character, the long version — where it came from, what it actually means, and the arguments people have had about it.
🌬 Wind Blowing Face Long before emoji, the wind on a map was a face with its cheeks full, tucked into a corner of the chart and blowing ships along. This design almost certainly descends from that convention, and it…🌀 Cyclone On a Japanese weather chart the spiral is the typhoon mark, and that is what the carriers were drawing when they put it into their emoji sets. All three shipped a version — DoCoMo, KDDI and SoftBank…𝄡 Musical Symbol C Clef Here is a character whose meaning Unicode deliberately declines to encode. A C clef says that middle C sits on whichever staff line runs through its centre — place it on the third line and it is the…♫ Beamed Eighth Notes Barred Eighth Notes The beam is the point. Two eighth notes joined by a single thick bar is how notation groups notes into a beat rather than leaving them standing about as separate flagged stems, and the count of bars…∄ There Does Not Exist Unicode records this one as two characters wearing a single codepoint. Its canonical decomposition is U+2203 THERE EXISTS followed by U+0338 COMBINING LONG SOLIDUS OVERLAY — the negation slash —…🗨 Left Speech Bubble Type this one on its own and you may get a flat monochrome outline rather than a coloured bubble. That is correct behaviour, not a broken font. It defaults to text presentation, so it needs U+FE0F…💭 Thought Balloon A scalloped edge and a trail of small circles instead of a tail. That is the entire visual grammar separating an unspoken thought from a spoken line, and it is settled enough that nobody has needed…💬 Speech Balloon Of the three Japanese carriers whose emoji sets Unicode absorbed in 2010, only KDDI shipped this one. DoCoMo and SoftBank had no speech balloon at all. The gap is still visible in the source data the…♮ Music Natural Sign Natural Cancelling is its entire job. A sharp raises a note and a flat lowers it; the natural undoes whatever the key signature or an earlier accidental in the bar had done, and returns the note to its plain…🧋 Bubble Tea Three details carry the whole identification at sixteen pixels: the dark pearls settled at the bottom, a straw wide enough to pull them up, and a heat-sealed film lid rather than a snap-on one.…🥺 Pleading Face Two names, and the gap between them explains the emoji. Unicode calls it FACE WITH PLEADING EYES. The label your picker shows is CLDR's short name, "pleading face". The formal name describes the…🤩 Star-struck Swap a character's eyes for a symbol and you have described their inner state without drawing anything else. Comics have leaned on that shorthand for a very long time — hearts for love, spirals for…😭 Loudly Crying Face In April 2021 this face overtook Face with Tears of Joy as the most-used emoji on Twitter — the first month, on Emojipedia's tracking of that platform, in which anything else had held the top spot.…🐻❄️ Polar Bear There is no polar bear in Unicode. There is a bear, a snowflake, and an instruction to fuse the two: U+1F43B, whose formal name is still BEAR FACE, then a zero width joiner, then U+2744 snowflake…ᑜ Canadian Syllabics West-cree Twii Read the shape and you have the sound. In syllabics the consonant is the outline and the vowel is which way it points — down for e, up for i, right for o, left for a — so ᐯ ᐱ ᐳ ᐸ are pe, pi, po, pa…෴ Sinhala Punctuation Kunddaliya Sri Lanka punctuates with full stops and commas now, like everywhere else. This is the mark that job used to belong to. The Unicode Standard describes the kunddaliya as having been used "as a…ര Malayalam Letter Ra Malayalam runs two r-letters side by side, and this is the softer of the pair: ര ra, not റ rra at U+0D31. Unicode files the two as confusables, which is an unusually frank admission for a standard to…ಠ Kannada Letter Ttha In Kannada it is ttha — the aspirated retroflex stop, second in the series ಟ ಠ ಡ ಢ ಣ, an ordinary consonant of a language written across Karnataka and used for Tulu besides. Outside Kannada it is an…Ⓐ Circled Latin Capital Letter A Any process that applies NFKC turns Ⓐ into a plain A and cannot tell the two apart afterwards. U+24B6 carries a compatibility decomposition to U+0041, so search indexes, username checks and…٭ Arabic Five Pointed Star An asterisk that belongs to the Arabic script, and the bidirectional algorithm treats it that way. U+066D has bidi class AL, Arabic Letter, where the ordinary asterisk at U+002A is ON, neutral. In…𝄞 Musical Symbol G Clef Everything awkward about this character follows from where it lives. U+1D11E sits in Musical Symbols, up in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane, so UTF-16 has to spell it with a surrogate pair…⟳ Clockwise Gapped Circle Arrow Same shape, three codepoints, three different blocks — and the differences between them are not visual. This is the gapped form, added in Unicode 3.2 to Supplemental Arrows-A. The open form has been…❄ Snowflake Filed as an ornament, not as weather. ❄ sits in the Dingbats block — the one Unicode imported wholesale from the ITC Zapf Dingbats typeface — several hundred codepoints away from the snowman and the…♯ Music Sharp Sign Sharp Of the three accidentals Unicode encodes, this is the only one it files as mathematics. The sharp is general category Sm; the flat and the natural beside it are both So. The reason is printed in the…