Your prayers have finally been answered. The taco has officially joined the ranks of other beloved emoji, like the middle finger, the Vulcan salute and that smiling pile of poo. That's it. We can all go home now. Nothing else is going to top that news today.
The Unicode Consortium announced back in November 2014 that 37 new characters were accepted as candidates to officially become emoji, the taco being one of them. Now the Unicode Consortium has released its latest update Unicode 8.0 Wednesday, which includes those 37 new emoji as well as five emoji modifiers.
The update includes the taco in all its yellow hard shell glory, a burrito stuffed with savory goodness and a unicorn face, which some may say looks just like the horse emoji except white and with a horn, but I say where is your imagination, sir? You can see the full list with pictures over at Emojipedia.org.
As you will see, there are plenty of new emojis to get excited about with this update. I mean, ice hockey has finally been deemed worthy of an emoji, just in time for the end of the season. If that's not big, I don't know what is.
However, none of the new emojis have been as long-awaited as the taco emoji. A petition from Taco Bell, a Facebook group and countless Twitter users have demanded a taco emoji for months. It's nice to know that when you really put your mind to something, you can actually achieve change.
Well, sort of. Unfortunately, just because a new Unicode update has been released doesn't mean that you can whip out your smartphone of choice and start sending people cheese wedges all willy nilly. The Unicode Consortium sets the standard for what emojis can be used, but it's up to companies to actually adopt those standards. We'll still have to wait for Apple, Google and Microsoft to include these new emojis with their subsequent OS updates.
For instance, although the middle finger emoji arrived with the Unicode 7 Standard last year, Microsoft is the only major platform that will let you use it with the arrival of Windows 10 on July 29. As Emojipedia.org points out, sometimes companies incorporate emojis into their OS before they're actually approved as Apple did when it introduced racially diverse emoji with its iOS 8.3 update when the Unicode 8 Standard was still in the draft stage.
So close and yet so far. Now all we can do is wait.
[H/T Munchies]
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Photo: Luca Nebuloni | Flickr
