If you have ever tried to describe your profession using emoji, you’ll know it can be quite a challenge.
But Apple wants to make life easier – for artists and astronauts at least – by adding to the selection available.
Peter Edberg, a senior software engineer at Apple has suggested five professional emoji to the Unicode Consortium – a not-for-profit organisation that decides which emoji will be rolled out around the world.
The suggestions include an artist, firefighter, pilot, judge, and astronaut, with versions available for both sexes and different races.
There's a chance these emoji, as well as others will be available to use in your messages later this year, or early in 2017 when the next update is expected, Emojipedia reported.
Unicode Emoji Version 4.0 is expected to include gendered emoji support, a rainbow flag emoji among others, as well as new professions.
Google initially recommended 13 professional emoji in May and now, after some changes, Apple – another member of the Unicode Consortium – added to it. There are now 16 new professional emoji in the latest list, or 32 if you count male and female versions.
In addition to Apple’s five, these include a health worker, farmer, cook, student, singer, teacher, factory worker, technologist, office worker, mechanic and scientist.
At the time, Google said it wanted to "increase the representation of women in emoji."
"Our proposal is to create a new set of emoji that represents a wide range of professions for women and men with a goal of highlighting the diversity of women's careers and empowering girls everywhere."
While these emoji may be far from describing every profession, they are designed to be interpreted clearly across different software and devices.
In June, the Unicode Consortium released images of 72 new emoji, including new food, objects, sports and face emoji that began to roll out at the end of the month.
Faces include "rolling on the floor laughing", "nauseated face", "clown face" and "lying face", with avocados, bacon, eggs, cucumbers and carrots added to the food category.
New animals include a fox, a bat, a gorilla, a deer, a rhino, an eagle, a duck, an owl, a lizard, a shark, a shrimp and a squid.
First, second and third place medals have been added to "activities" alongside a boxing glove, a person doing a cartwheel, a wrestler and a juggler.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
