Emoji & Unicode Versions

The Unicode Consortium is the non-profit organisation that maintains the Unicode Standard — the universal character encoding system that underpins text across virtually every modern computer system. Founded in 1991, it standardises emoji through two complementary versioning schemes:

• Unicode Standard— The core character encoding standard. New emoji characters are added in each Unicode release (e.g. Unicode 15.0).
• Emoji Spec (UTS #51)— A separate versioning track (e.g. Emoji 15.0) that specifically catalogs approved emoji sequences, ZWJ combinations, and skin-tone variants.