Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs


Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs is a Unicode block containing meteorological and astronomical symbols, emoji characters largely for compatibility with Japanese telephone carriers' implementations of Shift JIS, and characters originally from the Wingdings and Webdings fonts found in Microsoft Windows.

Emoji

The block contains 637 emoji and has 312 standardized variants defined to specify emoji-style or text presentation for 156 base characters.

Emoji modifiers

The Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block has 52 emoji that represent people or body parts.
For these, a set of "Emoji modifiers" are defined. These are modifier characters intended to define the skin colour to be used for the emoji, based on the Fitzpatrick scale :
The draft document suggesting the introduction of this system for the representation of "human diversity" was submitted in August 2014 by Mark Davis of Google and Peter Edberg of Apple Inc. and was adopted in Unicode version 8.0.
Online commentators have criticized the attempts of the Unicode Consortium to reflect postulates of political correctness in the contemporary US American culture wars as an empty gesture at best, and "insulting" at worst.

Table of emojis with modifiers

The following table shows the full combinations of the "human emoji" characters with each of the five modifiers, which should display each character in each of the five skin tones provided a suitable font is installed on the system and the rendering software is capable of handling modifier characters, platforms without emoji modifier support may show as boxes:
Additional human emoji can be found in other Unicode blocks: Dingbats, Emoticons, Miscellaneous Symbols, Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs and Transport and Map Symbols.

Chart

History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block: