The past and future of hand emoji Lauren Gawne, 1 Jennifer Daniel, 2 1 La Trobe University 2 Google l.gawne@latrobe.edu.au, jenniferx@google.com Abstract Human handshapes have been encoded as emoji since the ear- liest implementations. The flexible and accessible semantic domain of human gestures has continued to provide a source of new emoji. We provide an overview of the history of hand gestures in the Unicode emoji set. We then discuss the utility and challenges of encoding hand emoji, as well as the current direction being taken by Unicode. Gestures are one semiotic resource people draw on to com- municate. The stable and often wide-spread form/meaning relationship of some handshapes as gestures has made them an attractive resource for encoding as emoji. The commu- nicative accessibility of hand-based emoji is evident in the fact that hands (distinct from other body part emoji) are the third most commonly used type of emoji, behind hearts and faces (McCulloch 2019), and two gesture emoji are in the top 10 of use-frequency data across platforms in a dataset from Unicode, Folded Hands ( ) at #5 and Thumbs Up ( ) at #10 (2019). The popularity of emoji is in tension with the fact that they operate as a centralised standard. Taking a look at the communicative function of particular types of emoji, in this case gestural handshapes, can help assess the communica- tive value of emoji and chart a future that sits with Uni- code’s renewed priority of globally relevant emoji (Unicode 2021a). In this short paper we provide an overview of the history of hand emoji. We then look at the benefits and chal- lenges of including human hand emoji in the encoded set. This frames a discussion of the future utility of continuing to encode hand emoji. Taking stock of a particular type of emoji allows for a more thoughtful approach to delivering communicatively useful emoji. We use ‘gesture’ to mean intentional bodily action used in communication (Kendon 2004, McNeill 1992), and focus on hand and arm gestures, rather than facial expressions or gestures with other parts of the body. The line between ges- ture and other actions is not hard-and-fast, and highly con- text dependent (Goodwin 2007). We use ‘handshape’ to re- fer to any manipulation of the hands into a particular config- uration without necessarily indicating communicative mean- Copyright © 2021, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. Figure 1: The original Softbank and Docomo handshapes. ing. A single handshape emoji can be used for a gesture or an action, particularly in combination with other emoji (e.g. ‘mic drop’ ). This communicative flexibility is a use- ful feature for emoji encoding. 1 The history of hand emoji Hands were included in emoji inventories prior to Unicode encoding (Figure 1). The 1999 Docomo set of 161 emoji included four hand gestures; Raised Fist, Victory Hand, Raised Hand, and Oncoming Fist. An earlier set of 90 emoji from Softbank in 1997 included these three as well as Index Pointing Up, Thumbs Up and Raised Fist. Although we have given these characters their Unicode names, across both sets the Raised Fist, Raised Hand and Victory Hand were orig- inally encoded as Rock, Paper and Scissors from the game of the same name, before being renamed when they were encoded by Unicode (Scherer 2010). This explains the hor- izontal orientation of the Softbank set, and the colour dis- tinction in the Docomo set. Although used, and named, as gestures now, these emoji started out as actions. By the time Emoji 1.0 was encoded by Unicode in Au- gust 2015 there were 29 gesture emoji. These mostly in- cluded handshapes, including five different pointing gestures ( ) but also a face (Thinking Face ) and four torso emoji (Person Gesturing No , Person Gestur- ing OK , Person Tipping Hand and Person Raising Hand ) as well as the monkey trio ( ). Some of the characters in Emoji 1.0 were adopted from the Docomo set, some were already in Unicode as dingbats or other sym- bols, and others were added from submissions to Unicode.