Rediscovering the Joys of Unicode

I was over on copychar.cc this morning, as it's become my go-to tool for quick access to emojis for web projects. After I had found what I was looking for, I decided to poke around what else was available - lo and behold I found LOTS of other symbols. This led me down one heck of a rabbit hole.

I always knew that Unicode was the standards body for characters and symbols in computing. Who doesn't love a good standard! But I did not know how deep Unicode goes - like the full breadth of the characters and symbols included. There's almost 150,000 in total! 😵‍💫 Just in case you ever want to write an email in Cuneiform instead of using your clay tablet, you can! And more characters are regularly being added. For those interested, you can see the full Unicode Pipeline for adding new characters and symbols. One recent addition, which is scheduled for a 2024 release is "Face with Bags Under Eyes". God knows I'll be using that alot.

But what about other Unicode symbols, other than emoji? Well I decided to dig into this doozy of a table - which seems to have most? if not all of the 150,000 items included in the "Unicode Planes and Blocks." I will now also be using symbl.cc instead of copychar.cc due to it's quality of information and tools available.

I am now thoroughly interested in the idea of using Unicode symbols as a personal logo of sorts. More on that another time.

Here are some of my favorite Unicode symbols that I found during my search, along with my own description for them ala some psuedo-Rorschach test:

• 𐃸 - a lil ladle
• 𞋇 - olive
• 🜽 - minimalist cassette tape
• ᑀ - minimal pacman
• ᙹ - a mini picasso portrait
• ㏊㏊ - selfexplanatory
• ꗞ - green lantern (2011) was a bad movie
• 𐙼 - hosre
• ᑒ - surprised fella
• 𛱐 - stairway to?
• 𓐠 - it's a lie
• 𓇶 - sputnik (also rip laika)