Last week, the Unicode Consortium released a noticeably short list of 31 new emoji candidates, including a shaking face, a jellyfish, a handheld fan, and maracas.
The volunteer-run nonprofit, which maintains emoji encoding standards, is reportedly reducing the number of emojis encoded each year, focusing more on quality than quantity, according to Input Magazine.
As Alexander Robertson, with his PhD in emoji from the University of Edinburgh, recently pointed out — if you add as few as 10-15 emoji annually for 5k years, you’ll eventually have 60k+ emoji.
Fun fact: The red flag (🚩) — as in, what you hope you don’t find in a date — is the most popular flag emoji. Flags are also the least popular category, despite being the most numerous.