Troll, disco ball, melting face: New emojis are coming

An emoji is worth a thousand words – and our chat vocabulary is about to get far, far richer. Three dozen new emojis are set to appear in our smartphone chats, with a disco ball, melting face and troll among the highlights.

The Unicode Consortium, responsible for emoji development, has announced 37 new emojis – mostly facial reactions, hand gestures and icons for nature, food, drink and leisure activities.

An “I-can’t-watch” face and a saluting emoji are likely to be some of the most popular additions, as is one face trying to hold back tears and another melting into the ground. There’s also a hand with fingers crossed and a pair of hands forming a heart.

The emoji powers-that-be meanwhile assume there will be occasions where you’ll need one of the following: a life preserver, a car wheel, a jar, a troll, a disco ball, a playground slide, an X-ray picture and an identity card.

Over in the nature section, there will be a coral, a lotus flower, beans and bird’s nests. Oh, and you can also get that last one with eggs and without eggs.

This year, however, only a few people will probably be able to write messages with the new emojis. By the end of the year at the earliest and then in the course of 2022, the new Unicode 14 keyboard standard will have been incorporated into all operating systems.