This was the first Unicode release to standardize the emoji set. The 12 clock emojis showing each half hour come from a different source: Wingdings.Īll made it into the same version of the Unicode Standard: Unicode 6.0, released in 2010. SoftBank, one such carrier, had 12 clocks showing the hour, which all became Unicode characters.
When the Unicode Consortium was first deciding what characters to encode as emojis in 2009, they looked to existing emojis used by Japanese phone carriers. Why are there so many clock faces? The answer to this question is compatibility. Image: Apple designs, Emojipedia composite. There are 12 of them for each hour and another 12 for each half hour.Ībove: 24 clock face emojis. They’re also used significantly less than the other timepiece emojis. Hiding in plain sight on emoji keyboards are 24 individual clock faces that are used several orders of magnitude less than face and heart emojis according to Unicode’s emoji frequency data. I’m also not including any calendar emojis because I’m focusing on emojis that tell time in terms of hours and minutes, not days, months, or years. You could argue that any sun or moon emojis belong on this list, but those emojis have more diverse meanings, so I’ve excluded them from this particular analysis. There are a handful of emojis that more or less tell time: There is something very clearly bizarre about pandemic time.īecause the pandemic has altered the sense of time for so many, there is no moment like the present to explore the representation of time in emojis. The American Dialect Society nominated ‘Blursday’ and ‘Before Times’ for their 2020 Word of the Year vote. According to the New York Times, Google saw an uptick in searches for the days of the week in 2020. Starting around April 2020, a cluster of articles popped up exploring the science of how time feels meaningless during a pandemic. The pandemic may have warped our collective sense of time, but time has always been strange in the emoji world.