
The world demands an emoji for every occasion, but soon, lovers of eyeballs and speech bubbles will finally get their day. It appears that Apple is about to release a mysterious new emoji. Thatâs it above. Weird, huh?
Itâs actually pretty clever. Jeremy Burge, the founder of Emojipedia, just spotted the new emoji character in the developer previews of iOS 9.1 and OS X 10.11.1. The emoji first shows up as a placeholder ellipsis, but when you hold your finger on it, youâll see the old eyeball and speech bubble emoji side-by-side. The new emoji is actually those two emoji joined together to create a new emoji that Apple calls, appropriately, âeye in speech bubble.â In Burgeâs words, âNobody knows what it is, or why it exists.â

The practice of joining emoji characters is hardly novel. It uses a Unicode character call the Zero Width Joiner (ZWJ) to join the two emoji into a new one, though the ZWJ shows up as an invisible character. This is how Apple already creates some emoji, like the various family characters. Those emoji are actually just combinations of the individual man, woman, boy, and girl emoji characters. Itâs actually very common, and Unicode even has a guide to how it works.
Youâre probably still wondering what the heck âeye in speech bubbleâ is supposed to represent. Well, the emoji-makers at Unicode Consortium didnât say anything about a new emoji, but they did confirm that this sort of thing isnât against the rules.
Advertisement
âVendors are free to make combinations of emoji using the ZWJ,â Unicode president and co-founder Mark Davis told Gizmodo. âThe only constraint is that they are meaningful as a sequence.â
Feel free to interpret âmeaningfulâ liberally. At least with âeye in speech bubbleâ itâs either a cheesy pun for iMessage or some sort of Illuminati symbol. Probably both.
Update (09.29.2015): Designer Erik Veland says he figured it out:
Advertisement
And Burge appears to back him up. However, everyone is still super puzzled about why Apple would make an anti-bullying emoji. Weâll know one dayâmaybe!
Images via Jeremy Burge
Advertisement