📝 Unicode & The Unicode Standard

Unicode, also known as the Unicode Consortium, is a non-profit member organization responsible for recommending new emoji characters and concepts for our emoji keyboards. 

However, the recommendation of new emojis is just a small part of Unicode’s operations.

Founded in 1988, Unicode’s primary function is to maintain and update the Unicode Standard, a text encoding standard designed to support all characters and symbols from all the world's writing systems.

As of Unicode 15.1 published in September 2023, the standard defines 149,813 characters across 161 scripts. 

As of Emoji 15.1, there are 3,782 emojis recommended by Unicode. This means emojis make up just a tiny fraction of the total characters in the Unicode Standard.