From Piñatas To West African Food, Emoji Diversity Is Improving, but There’s Still a Ways To Go
Texting vernacular has come a long way since this form of communication first became a reality. Gone are the days when a person had to use letters, numbers, and punctuation to create a very limited range of facial expressions. Emoticons are still much in use today, but together with the rise of the smartphone, they’ve paved the way for their successors: emojis. Emojis, unlike emoticons, are image-based, which opens up many possibilities when it comes to what they can be of — expressions, actual people, everyday objects, animals, etc. And with a current total of 3,304 emojis in the official Unicode list, and more added every year, those possibilities are ever-growing.