Emoji growth is slowing. Why?

Last week, the Unicode Consortium released a noticeably short list of 31 new emoji candidates, including a shaking face, a jellyfish, a handheld fan, and maracas.

The volunteer-run nonprofit, which maintains emoji encoding standards, is reportedly reducing the number of emojis encoded each year, focusing more on quality than quantity, according to Input Magazine.

• In 2010, there were ~700 emoji. Today, there are 3.6k+. A significant number of those are skin tone alternates, but still, that’s a lotta symbols.

As Alexander Robertson, with his PhD in emoji from the University of Edinburgh, recently pointed out — if you add as few as 10-15 emoji annually for 5k years, you’ll eventually have 60k+ emoji.

Fun fact: The red flag (🚩) — as in, what you hope you don’t find in a date — is the most popular flag emoji. Flags are also the least popular category, despite being the most numerous.