If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many is an emoji worth?
Regardless of the answer, you'll have 2,834 new ways to communicate with emoji as the Unicode Consortium has released the list of the new symbols it has added to its growing list.
Among the more interesting symbols from that list that you'll soon be able to send as part of your text and email messages are a symbol for spying, a steaming pile of poo, the live long and prosper hand gesture and, of course, everyone's favorite symbol, the middle finger.
While Apple had announced a couple of months ago that it planned to introduce more racially diverse characters, the new Unicode emoji do not include any racial references.
Since Apple, Google and Microsoft will have to create new icons to allow their devices to support version 7.0 of the Unicode Standard, it may still take some time before users see an update that brings the new characters to their devices.
One question users will eventually answer is that with all these new ways to communicate using symbols, will using emoji lose some of its appeal? Part of the fun has always been in seeing how a limited cast of emoji characters could be repurposed in unexpected and amusing ways by users.
At least one industry expert doesn't think so.
"If you give people a library of a thousand images that lets them say exactly what they want to say, they're going to gravitate toward those images," said Jennifer Grenz, vice president of marketing at messaging app company Lango.
The website fivethirtyeight.com recently researched emoji use on Twitter and actually came up with a list of the most frequently used emoji.
The Top Five: The heart symbol was number one, followed by the happy face, the unamused face, the heart eye face (indicating in love), and the relaxed face.
After Unicode's new emoji begin making the rounds we'll be interested to see where the middle finger winds up next time FiveThirtyEight does its research. After all, Twitter is the most pessimistic place on the planet.
And file this one under the "really silly emoji data" tagline: men who use the smiley face symbol in their profile have a 6 percent decrease in incoming messages and 12 percent fewer responses to outgoing messages. However, that same data claims women who use it receive 60 percent more messages.
Who knew that all this emoji use can become such a slippery slope?
