NPR
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Every time you type on your cell phone's keyboard you're punching in tiny bits of Unicode, a universal standard for creating text, numbers, and emoji. Emoji, taken from the Japanese words ? " e" (picture) ? "mo" (writing) ? " ji" (character), are pictorial symbols used to communicate simple ideas with even simpler images. This past summer the Unicode Consortium introduced about 250 new standard emoji including a spider web, sunglasses, and a hand giving the middle finger. Conspicuously missing from the emoji catalog, however, was a wider selection of non-white human faces.