It’s official. You can now use whisky emojis on your Apple smartphone. The emojis were considered and approved by the Unicode Consortium, which standardises characters and emojis across operating systems. The ‘Tumbler Glass’  is part of a packet of new emojis included in Unicode 9.0 which was released earlier into the Emojidex in June, and slowly rolled out onto social media and smartphones, with Apple the latest addition. Facebook will introduce it early next year.

Other emojis in Unicode 9.0 include ‘Eagle’, ‘Avocado’, and ‘Man Dancing’. Have a look for yourself. The whisky emoji features a tumbler filled with golden liquid with an ice cube in it, which will probably annoy not a few whisky purists. I suppose some progress is better than none in this case. Then again, it could also pass for other spirits, including rum and bourbon.

The emojis were officially announced last year, when Unicode explained that the new batch were chosen based on various factors - they filled gaps in the existing universe of emojis, the distinctiveness of the proposed character and popular requests from online communities.

This last point is important because blended whisky company Ballantines has been campaigning hard for the creation of a whisky emoji , using the hashtag #whiskyemoji across Facebook and Twitter. On whisky news website scotchwhisky.com, Ballantines claims to have submitted the emoji suggestion to Unicode, and there’s no reason not to believe them.

Emoji is considered to be the world’s fastest growing language. The original design for them, unveiled in 1999 by Shigetake Kurita, featured 176 icons for Japanese mobile phones.  Now there are 1,800 emojis used by 90% of the world’s online population, a language that is universal across cultures.

There are a few other boozy emojis out there. Beer mugs, as well as wine and cocktail glasses, have been available for a while so Whisky Tumbler joins this pictorial gang. Even better, there’s also a new way to celebrate the addition of Whisky Tumbler to the emoji list, the ‘Clinking Glass' emoji was also released in Unicode 9.0.  Cheers to that.

Source: forbes