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.
¹ Superscript One Superscript Digit One The raised one, filed by Unicode as a number rather than as punctuation: general category No, numeric value 1, bidirectional class EN. Like its two neighbours in the Latin-1 range it carries a…🧿 Nazar Amulet The last character in its block. U+1F9FF sits at the very end of Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs, which runs to U+1F9FF and has no free positions in its 256; it dates from Unicode 11.0, has…🥭 Mango A late arrival in an old subgroup. U+1F96D sits in Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs, dates from Unicode 11.0, has general category So and carries Emoji_Presentation. Its subgroup in the…📦 Package A postal object doing software work. U+1F4E6 sits in Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs, dates from Unicode 6.0, has general category So and carries Emoji_Presentation. It is one of 371 characters…💄 Lipstick A cosmetic object with no hand attached. U+1F484 sits in Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs, dates from Unicode 6.0, has general category So and carries Emoji_Presentation. The character…🐁 Mouse A zodiac animal encoded twice over. U+1F401 sits at the head of Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs' animal run with general category So, dates from Unicode 6.0, and carries Emoji_Presentation so…➗ Divide A division sign drawn as an icon. U+2797 is So in Dingbats, added in Unicode 6.0 (2010) — one of sixteen characters that version put into a block whose other members date mostly from 1993. Its chart…⚡ High Voltage A lightning bolt whose formal name is HIGH VOLTAGE SIGN and whose chart aliases are "thunder" and "lightning symbol". U+26A1 is So in Miscellaneous Symbols, added in Unicode 4.0 (2003), and unlike…✔️ Check Mark A two-codepoint sequence: the Dingbats tick at U+2714, whose Unicode name is HEAVY CHECK MARK, followed by U+FE0F, the emoji variation selector. The base character has been in Unicode since version…🤙 Call Me Hand A newer hand in the newer block. U+1F919 was added in Unicode 9.0 to Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs — the block that took the emoji added after the older one filled up — with general category…