The power of emoji cannot be underestimated. Last year, a Canadian court said that the yellow “thumbs-up” emoji sent by a farmer to a contract sent by a grain cooperative was as good as an agreement. Well, get ready for a new set of emoji (yes, the word can be used in both singular and plural forms).

The Unicode Consortium has suggested adding seven additional emoji to the standardised catalogue referenced by iOS, Android, and other devices. So far, the new emojis expected for iOS 18 include a face with bags under the eyes, a fingerprint, a leafless tree, a root vegetable, a harp, a shovel and splatter.

The beta review period for Unicode 16.0 is till July 2 after which the new emoji will probably be approved. But it can take a few months for the likes of Apple, Google and Microsoft to make their designs and roll it out to the public.

One of the interesting suggestion is the shovel. Gen Z is increasingly using emoji with a hint of the macabre. For example, the skull emoji — for them — symbolises humour or irony, like an exclamation mark. The shovel too may a tone tag.

One has to understand that tone tags for irony is not new. In the late 1580s, English printer Henry Denham suggested a “percontation point” for rhetorical questions. The inverted exclamation point is another example. The emoji keyboard has made it easy to use signs and symbols.