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.
🥯 Bagel Apple redrew this one in public, mid-beta. The bagel that shipped in an iOS 12.1 beta in 2018 was pale and machine-smooth; New Yorkers took it personally, and by beta 4 the drawing had gained texture…🥮 Moon Cake Not a dessert emoji so much as a calendar entry. U+1F96E is the cake eaten at the Mid-Autumn Festival, which falls on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month — so its season moves, landing…🚪 Door A door filed with the trains. U+1F6AA sits in the Transport and Map Symbols block, which reads as a misfiling until you notice what that block actually collected: the signage and station furniture of…📷 Camera A compact point-and-shoot with a fat lens barrel — the design froze a camera body that smartphones were already busy retiring. That is what happens when a picture becomes a character: the object can…💕 Two Hearts Pink, paired, and pointed at a person rather than a thing. The two-heart pair is the one people reach for when the feeling is affection rather than a declaration, and CLDR's keyword list is unusually…💂 Guard Unicode character names are frozen once published, which is how you end up with a mismatch like this one. U+1F482 is formally GUARDSMAN, permanently, while the name your phone shows is "guard" — CLDR…♊ Gemini Encoded in 1993 as a plain astrological sign, and quietly conscripted seventeen years later. U+264A has been in Miscellaneous Symbols since Unicode 1.1, alongside the other eleven signs; when the…🐛 Bug Programmers reach for this one to mean a defect in code, and Unicode's own annotation quietly disagrees: the keywords filed against U+1F41B are animal, bug, garden and insect. The usual drawing is a…∪ Union Microsoft's Shift-JIS has this character twice. In CP932, both 0x81BE and 0x879C decode to U+222A — the second coming from the NEC extension rows bolted on beside the JIS X 0208 core. Decoding is…∩ Intersection Old enough to have been in the original IBM PC's character ROM. Code page 437 put this at 0xEF in 1981, which is why it shows up in DOS-era text and ASCII art more than a decade before Unicode…🎤 Microphone Handheld, on a stick, pointed at whoever is singing — the design has barely moved since the Japanese carriers drew it, and all three of them drew it. Unicode's EmojiSources file records a code for…🍋 Lemon Add a green square and it turns into a lime. That is not a joke about colour theory: the lime emoji is a zero-width joiner sequence made of this character plus U+1F7E9 LARGE GREEN SQUARE, added in…❗ Red Exclamation Mark The name and the picture stopped agreeing a long time ago, and the standard cannot fix it. Formally this character is HEAVY EXCLAMATION MARK SYMBOL — nothing about red in it — because Unicode names…✨ Sparkles Three Japanese carriers had a version of this before Unicode did — DoCoMo, KDDI and SoftBank each carried a code for it, and the round-trip mappings are still published in Unicode's EmojiSources…🦎 Lizard Eight reptiles sit in Unicode's reptile grouping, and only one of them is a plain lizard. The crocodile, the snake, the turtle, two dinosaurs and two dragons all have their own codepoints; everything…🐀 Rat Unicode encodes the rat and the mouse as two separate animals, and then encodes a mouse's face as a third. In practice the distinction survives only at large sizes: designers draw this one longer…🔻 Red Triangle Pointed Down Markets fall, ratings drop, and this is the glyph that gets pasted next to the number. Unicode's own name is DOWN-POINTING RED TRIANGLE, and like its upward twin it was encoded in version 6.0 under…🔺 Red Triangle Pointed Up Two names, and they disagree. Unicode's formal name is UP-POINTING RED TRIANGLE; the emoji name in common use, the one at the top of this page, reverses the wording. Same codepoint either way, added…◀ Black Left-pointing Triangle Black Left Pointing Triangle Mirror the play button and you get this one, which is why it usually means back, reverse or previous rather than anything geometric. The standard is silent on all of that: BLACK LEFT-POINTING…▶ Black Right-pointing Triangle Black Right Pointing Triangle Press play on almost anything and this is the shape you are pressing. Unicode never says so — the name is BLACK RIGHT-POINTING TRIANGLE and it predates the media player entirely, having been in the…▽ White Down-pointing Triangle White Down Pointing Triangle The standard lists an alias here that gives the game away: "Hamilton operator". That is the del or nabla operator of vector calculus, and the hollow down-pointing triangle has been standing in for it…▼ Black Down-pointing Triangle Black Down Pointing Triangle Down means two opposite things in interfaces, and this triangle has to carry both. Beside a number it reads as loss — a fall, a decrease, a downgrade. Beside a label it reads as an invitation: open…△ White Up-pointing Triangle White Up Pointing Triangle Unicode files a second name under this one: "trine", the astrological aspect for two planets roughly a third of the zodiac apart. That alias is the reason the hollow triangle turns up in chart…▲ Black Up-pointing Triangle Black Up Pointing Triangle Sort a table column ascending and this is usually the mark you get. On its own it carries no meaning at all — Unicode names it BLACK UP-POINTING TRIANGLE and stops there. Every reading it has picked…