Apple Proposes 5 New Emoji Professions

Apple has submitted a proposal to Unicode to add five new emoji professions, including an artist, firefighter, pilot, astronaut and judge.

The renderings, and  by Emojipedia, include men and women in each role for a total of 10 new emoji options.

Emoji have become increasingly important for mobile users. But in order for them to become universally accepted by all services and platforms, they need to be approved by Unicode, a consortium made up of some of the world's largest companies, including Apple, Google and others.

Unicode itself is short for universal character encoding and is maintained by the Consortium. It's the standard by which text data is transmitted over technology.

"Unicode covers all the characters for all the writing systems of the world, modern and ancient," the Consortium says. "It also includes technical symbols, punctuations and many other characters used in writing text. The Unicode Standard is intended to support the needs of all types of users, whether in business or academia, using mainstream or minority scripts."

Once emoji are submitted to the Consortium, they are either accepted or denied. If accepted, they become part of Unicode and therefore capable of being interpreted by the billions of devices worldwide that use it.