Unicode have released the latest version of the Unicode Standard. This is a minor update which was released on the 12th September 2023. Included in this update, there has been 627 new characters added, which brings the total numbers of characters to 149,813. In addition to the extra characters, there has been 28 new emojis released. Lets take a closer look at the new characters and emojis that have been released.

New Characters

As stated above, Unicode added an extra 627 characters to the latest release to the Unicode Standard. With the new characters, there was one new block included in this release, it is - CJK Unified Ideographs Extension I. Following is the total number of characters added to each block:

- CJK Unified Ideographs Extension I - 622 New Characters

- CJK Strokes - 1 New Character

- Ideographs Description Characters - 4 New Characters

New Emojis

We mentioned above that there were 28 new emojis added to this release. If you include the emojis that can have a skin tone added, then there is 118 new emojis. Lets have a look at a breakdown of the new emojis.

10 Completely new emoji designs, they are:

Head Shaking Horizontally

Head Shaking Vertically

Family: Adult, Child

Family: Adult, Child, Child

Family: Adult, Adult, Child, Child

Family: Adult, Adult, Child

Phoenix

Lime

Brown Mushroom

Broken Chain

The remaining 18 new emojis (108 including skin tones) are people emojis facing right:

Note: Images above are sample images, they are not the final designs.

That's it for now, hopefully you will enjoy the new additions that have been made to Unicode version 15.1 standard. As these characters and emojis are new, they will not show correctly on the majority of operating systems, generally they will appear during 2024.