📚 New Emoji Are Being Delayed Because of the Coronavirus Pandemic

One unexpected effect of the coronavirus pandemic has to do with the colorful little pictograms we use on our phones and computers to express, well, pretty much everything: emoji. From a report: According to the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit which takes care of the Unicode Standard -- a widely-used standard for character encoding on computers and phones -- the release of Unicode 14.0 has been postponed by six months. "Under the current circumstances we've heard that our contributors have a lot on their plates at the moment and decided it was in the best interests of our volunteers and the organizations that depend on the standard to push out our release date," Mark Davis, President of the Unicode Consortium, said in a statement. Unicode 14.0 was supposed to be released in March 2021, but that has been moved six months into the future, to September 2021. Since it takes a while for developers to incorporate new emoji into phones -- typically eight months or so, according to the Consortium -- this means we won't get any new emoji until well into 2022.

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