Unicode 9.0 announced; brings support for 7,500 new characters, including 72 emoji

The Unicode Consortium today made Unicode 9 official, adding support for exactly 7,500 new characters, bringing the total to 128,172.

72 of the new characters are emoji, which you can see in the image above. For more detail on the new emoji, you can check out the documentation here.

There are also new scrips that add support for lesser-used languages. These include:

• Osage, a Native American language

• Nepal Bhasa, a language of Nepal

• Fulani and other African languages

• The Bravanese dialect of Swahili, used in Somalia

• The Warsh orthography for Arabic, used in North and West Africa

• Tangut, a major historic script of China

Here's a breakdown of new characters:

There are also 19 new television symbols, for the new 4K TV standard.

Google was one of the first to implement the new standard over two months ago in the second developer preview of Android N. Of course, since it wasn't official at the time, it stands to reason that support for the standard wasn't complete either.

Don't worry, folks. There's no longer any need to go through the tireless efforts of typing 'ROTFL' anymore. There's an emoji for that.

For more information about the Unicode 9 standard, you can check out the full release notes here.

Source: Unicode Consortium