Last year, we brought you news of the 250 new emoji characters that the Unicode Consortium had included to the standard emoji listing. One of the standout emoji characters we highlighted back then was the middle finger emoji. Sadly, to date, none of the big two i.e. Apple and Google, has added that emoji character through the updates they’ve been making to their respective platforms. That doesn’t stop Microsoft as the company has the middle finger emoji as part of the set that will show up on Windows 10.
Spotted by the folks at emojipedia the middle finger emoji is officially known as “reversed hand with middle finger extended”. Yes, that!
While the middle finger emoji is what will catch headlines all over thanks in part to its unique use-case in real life today, there are other changes coming to Windows emojis as well including the controversial depiction of human skin tones, changes in the font and the transition to what many users of OS X/iOS and Android will directly recognize and relate to. Still missing though is the support for country flags like was the case with Twitter during the World Cup last year.
While many users may not realize, Windows has had quite a history with supporting emoji characters. While Microsoft passed on the fad that now accounts for over 50% of all Instagram photo captions and comments with Windows 7 back in 2009, it caught on the trend with Windows 8 before entering the proper path with Windows 8.1. It is the Windows 8.1 emoji characters that are being updated to match the current Unicode Consortium standard in readiness for Windows 10 release later in the year.
