Dingbats is a
Unicode block
A Unicode block is one of several contiguous ranges of numeric character codes (code points) of the Unicode character set that are defined by the Unicode Consortium for administrative and documentation purposes. Typically, proposals such as the ...
containing
dingbat
In typography, a dingbat (sometimes more formally known as a printer's ornament or printer's character) is an ornament, specifically, a glyph used in typesetting, often employed to create box frames (similar to box-drawing characters), or a ...
s (or typographical ornaments, like the ❦ FLORAL HEART character). Most of its characters were taken from
Zapf Dingbats; it was the Unicode block to have imported characters from a specific typeface; Unicode later adopted a policy that excluded symbols with "no demonstrated need or strong desire to exchange in plain text", and thus no further dingbat typefaces were encoded until
Webdings and
Wingdings were encoded in Version 7.0. Some ornaments are also an
emoji
An emoji ( ; plural emoji or emojis; , ) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram, or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of modern emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from type ...
, having optional presentation variants (called variant selectors).
The block, originally named "Zapf Dingbats", was added to the
Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
Standard in October 1991, with the release of version 1.0. The block name was changed from "Zapf Dingbats" to "Dingbats" in June 1993, with the release of 1.1.
Chart
Emoji
The Dingbats block contains 33
emoji
An emoji ( ; plural emoji or emojis; , ) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram, or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of modern emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from type ...
.
66
standardized variants are defined to specify emoji-style (like ) or text presentation (like ) for 33 characters.
Emoji modifiers
The Dingbats block has four emoji that represent hands.
They can be modified using U+1F3FB–U+1F3FF to provide for a range of
human skin color
Human skin color ranges from the Dark skin, darkest brown to the Light skin, lightest hues. Differences in Human skin, skin color among individuals is caused by variation in pigmentation, which is largely the result of genetics (inherited from o ...
using the
Fitzpatrick scale:
Additional human emoji can be found in other Unicode blocks:
Emoticons,
Miscellaneous Symbols,
Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs,
Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs,
Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A and
Transport and Map Symbols.
History
The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Dingbats block:
See also
*
Ornamental Dingbats, another Unicode block
References
{{Emoji navbox
Unicode blocks