New emojis for Emoji 15.0 previewed include "high-five" and pink heart

New emojis are coming to your messaging app soon including a "high-five" emoji which is bound to get a lot of use. The actual name of this emoji is "pushing hand." It is one of several new emojis that were previewed on the Emojipedia reference site and have been submitted for approval to the Unicode Consortium. The latter is in charge of worldwide emoji standards and releases.

Besides "pushing hand" aka "high-five," other new emojis include a shaking face, pink, light blue, and gray hearts, a Khanda (which is the symbol of the Sikh faith), the Wi-Fi (wireless) icon, a hair pick, a moose, a donkey, a jellyfish and more. Other new emoji previewed include a moose head, a crow, a goose, a pair of maracas, a pea pod, a wing, a flute, a blackbird, ginger, hyacinth, and a folding hand fan.

Unicode is expected to give final approval for Emoji 15.0 in September. At that point, the newly selected emoji would be sent to major operating system platforms and disseminated via software updates during 2022-2023.

Keith Broni, the editor-in-chief of Emojipedia, said in a blog post that "While some might not make the cut, most presented for approval are historically confirmed." With World Emoji Day coming this Sunday, Emojipedia says that emoji use on Twitter is at record highs. 22% of tweets sent this month have included at least one emoji. That is up from the 20.59% of tweets that contained an emoji last year and the 20.15% that carried an emoji two years ago.


While Broni made it clear that the new emoji that was highlighted today were previews and subject to change, last year's previews all made the final cut including the controversial pregnant man.

When Emoji 15.0 is introduced, the design of each emoji that "makes the team" could be different than how each one looks today. Emoji design also changes between vendors. We should also point out that the golden age of emoji creation might be behind us. In January 2020, 117 new emojis were approved for Emoji 13.0 and peaked at 217 in September 2020 for Emoji 13.1. In September 2021, 112 new emoji were green lit for Emoji 14.0, and this September Emoji 15.0 is estimated to have just 31 new emojis.