Update July 21: This article was updated to include the Landslide emoji, which was omitted from the original list.
Ballet dancers, bigfoot hunters, Fleetwood Mac fans, and trombone players, today is a special World Emoji Day for you! The Unicode Consortium has announced the newest set of emojis to be released, whittled down from the submissions late last year. Without further ado, here’s the list:
- Apple Core
- Ballet Dancers
- Distorted Face
- Fight Cloud
- Hairy Creature (Bigfoot)
- Landslide
- Orca
- Treasure Chest
- Trombone
The new emoji will be part of the Unicode 17.0 release, which is scheduled for this fall. They won’t be available when iOS 26 arrives in September, however. Since Apple adopts its own style for new emojis, this set will likely be available in a later iOS 26 update, likely in early 2026. For example, the latest set announced in 2024 was released as part of iOS 18.4 in March.
iOS 26 will also allow users to mix their favorite emojis with Apple Intelligence’s Genmoji feature.
The Unicode Consortium is a nonprofit foundation that maintains the Unicode Standard, a set of standards used to make sure text and emojis maintain their integrity across platforms. Every year, Unicode releases a new set of emojis, based on submitted proposals. Anyone can submit an emoji proposal online, and Unicode also has an Adopt a Character program that helps fund the foundation.
Apple made its own emoji-related announcement on Thursday with the release of the new Emoji Game on its Apple News+ service. The object of Emoji Game is to complete word phrases by interpreting a given set of emojis. If you’re in the spirit of Word Emoji Day, play the game, then check out the World Emoji Awards and rock out to the World Emoji Day anthem. And then start counting the days until you can send everyone an emoji of Bigfoot with a trombone.
Author: Roman Loyola, Senior Editor, Macworld
Roman is a Macworld Senior Editor with over 30 years of experience covering the tech industry, focusing on the Mac and other products in the Apple ecosystem. He is also the host of the Macworld Podcast. His career started at MacUser, where he received Apple certification as a repair technician (when Apple did that kind of thing). He's also worked for MacAddict, MacLife, and TechTV.