Looking to give back differently for this #GivingTuesday?

Adopt a Character or Emoji to give it the attention it deserves!

Now you can adopt a character and show off your hobby or business, favorite sport, or love. For that special someone who seems to have everything, you can also give a unique gift.

Allergies? 🤧 Traveling? ✈️ No worries, the cat emoji 😺 has no fur and requires no feeding! The dog emoji 🐶? No need to go out for a 3 am walk! Looking to be a Scrabble champ? The strong and fast letter Z is right for you!

​Your good friend is studying to be a doctor. How about the stethoscope emoji as a gift? 🩺Or even an emoji to support your favorite college football team this season! 🏈

With nearly 150,000 characters there's something for everyone! The possibilities are endless! It's also a tax-deductible donation in the United States, to the extent allowed by law. Your company may also provide matching funds.

☯🏏 🏈 ⚽ 🔥🎁💍爱戀🥳 🙌 🎂💗💟₨ ₪ € ₭ ₱🥰 😍♕Ωπ

About Adopt-a-Character

The Adopt-a-Character program was launched in 2015 to support Unicode's mission to ensure everyone can communicate in their own languages. Adopt-a-Character funds have supported work on historic scripts, including Old Uyghur, Old Sogdian, Sogdian, Seal Script (China), and Mayan Hieroglyphs, and Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Additional support has been provided to encode the modern scripts Hanifi Rohingya, Tolong Siki, and Sunuwar, among others.

Characters can be adopted at three levels:

Gold - $5,000

For any particular character there can only be one Gold adoption! Be the only!

Silver - $1,000
For any particular character there can only be five Silver adoptions! Be one of the five to adopt your favorite characters as a Silver adopter!

Bronze - $100
For any character, there are an unlimited number of Bronze-level adoptions! Also a wonderful option!

Each adoption is recognized with a digital badge that you (or your recipient!) can proudly share via your social channels and via websites. Adoptions also come with a digital certificate that you can print to display or email to your giftee!

About the Unicode Consortium

The Unicode Consortium is the premier 501(c)3 non-profit, open source, open standards body for the Internationalization of software and services. It is arguably the most widely deployed software in the world available across 20 billion devices and counting! At its core, Unicode enables people around the world to communicate in any language.

And - if you want to simply make a donation to support Unicode’s work, you can do that, too!

This Giving Tuesday, let's come together to continue to celebrate and preserve linguistic diversity. Adopt a character and make a difference!

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Support Unicode
To support Unicode’s mission to ensure everyone can communicate in their languages across all devices, please consider adopting a character, making a gift of stock, or making a donation. As Unicode, Inc. is a US-based open source, open standards, non-profit, 501(c)3 organization, your contribution may be eligible for a tax deduction. Please consult with a tax advisor for details.

Announcing New Unicode Adopt-a-Character Site

The Adopt-a-Character program was launched in 2015. Since that time, AAC funds have supported Unicode's mission to ensure everyone can communicate in their own language. This includes preserving historical scripts such as Egyptian hieroglyphics and providing better language support for digitally disadvantaged and under-resourced languages such as Hanifi Rohingya used in Myanmar and Bangladesh.

Now you can more easily adopt a character and show off your hobby or business, favorite sport, or love – while also supporting a good cause. You can also give the gift of a letter to someone in your life. The possibilities are endless – and each adoption helps Unicode’s goal to support the world’s languages.

All character adoptions are permanent. Adoption of a specific character at the limited gold and silver levels is on a first-come-first-served basis. All sponsors receive a digital badge and are recognized on Unicode’s website, Twitter feed, and Friends of Unicode Facebook page.

To start your adoption, visit our new page!

Unicode, Inc. is a non-profit, 501(c)3 organization and contributions may be eligible for a tax deduction. Please consult with a tax expert for details.

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Adopt a Character to Celebrate World Emoji Day

This week, the Unicode Consortium is excited to celebrate the calendar emoji, 📅, commonly displayed with July 17th. People are the power driving the popularity of emoji through their innovative use of them to share joy, activities, sports, individuality, and so much more.

Celebrate a favorite emoji or character this week by adopting a character! While many characters have been adopted since the program launched in December 2015, hundreds of emoji haven’t been adopted by anyone at any level, including fantastic ones like clapping hands (👏twelfth👏most👏used👏emoji👏), check box (for all your to-do list dreams), and the loudly crying emoji (I’m so proud of you! 😭). Imagine the possible messages you could send with a gift adoption! For example:

• Congratulations!!!!! 🥂
• Love You! 🖤
• Kisses 💋
• Did you see this👇🏽
• Yes, I adopted this face in your name 🥴
• My bad 😳
• Happy Birthday! To 100 more! 🎂

When you celebrate World Emoji Day this week by sponsoring your favorite emoji or another character for yourself or as a gift, your donation helps the non-profit Unicode Consortium support the world’s many languages and make the digital world more inclusive. The Consortium is funded by membership fees and donations from individuals, corporations, and other organizations. Your donations help support the vital work of the Consortium, making modern software and computing systems support the widest range of human languages. The Consortium will use your donation to improve language support and to preserve digital heritage. For more details, see How Donations are Used.

The Unicode Consortium Launches New Website in Celebration of World Emoji Day

The New Unicode.org Also Offers Emoji Enthusiasts the Chance to “Adopt a Character”

The Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit that maintains text standards to support all the world’s written languages across every device, today debuted a new look for unicode.org. The redesigned website will make information about the emoji proposal process more easily accessible while encouraging public participation and engagement in all Unicode initiatives.

“Unicode is a global technology standard that is one of the core building blocks of the internet,” said Unicode board member Greg Welch. “Unicode has helped facilitate the work of programmers and linguists from around the world since the 1990s. But with the rise of mobile devices and public enthusiasm for emoji, we knew it was time to redesign the Unicode website to make information more easily accessible, and increase community involvement.”

Emoji were adopted into the Unicode Standard in 2010 in a move that made the characters available everywhere. Today, emoji have been used by 92% of the world’s online population. And while emoji encoding and standardization make up just one small part of the Consortium’s text standards work, the growing popularity and demand for emoji have put the organization in the international spotlight.

“We’ve been working with the Unicode Consortium for several years to open up the emoji proposals process by making it more accessible and understandable,” said Jennifer 8. Lee, co-founder of Emojination. “While I personally found the late-90s aesthetic of the developer-centric Unicode.org site very retro and nerd charming, the new site redesign is a reflection of Unicode’s deep desire to engage the public in its work.”

In addition to offering a clearer picture of the emoji submission and standardization process, the new Unicode.org website offers information about the Consortium and its mission to enable people everywhere in the world to use any language on any device.

“Emoji are just one element of our broader mission,” said Mark Davis, president and co-founder of the Unicode Consortium. “The Consortium is a team of largely volunteers who are dedicated to ensuring that people all over the world can use their language of choice in digital communication across any computer, phone or other device. From English and Chinese to Cherokee, Hindi and Rohingya, the Consortium is committed to preserving every language for the digital era.”

A team of designers from Adobe provided design and branding support, as well as free access to leading design tools, to bring Unicode’s new website to life.

“The Unicode Consortium’s work to keep digitally disadvantaged languages alive is incredibly important,” said Adobe Design Program Manager Lisa Pedee. “We collaborated closely with the Consortium to develop a unique visual brand and streamlined web interface that makes everything from contributing language data to proposing an emoji more accessible, inclusive and user-friendly.”

The Consortium’s recent language work includes adding language data for Cherokee, encoding the Hanifi Rohingya script, and developing the Mayan hieroglyphic script.

The Consortium invites emoji and language enthusiasts to celebrate World Emoji Day on July 17 and “Adopt a Character” to support its ongoing efforts. More than 136,000 characters are up for adoption — including this new Emoji 12.0 additions such as the sloth, the sea otter, the waffle and Saturn.

Those who choose to adopt will receive a custom digital badge they can display to publicly show their support, whether on their website or social media. The Unicode Consortium is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization and “adoption fees” are tax-deductible in the U.S. Additionally, some companies may provide matching funds. Learn more and adopt your character here.

About the Unicode Consortium
The Unicode Consortium is a nonprofit on a mission to enable anyone to use any language across every device, globally. The Consortium develops, extends and promotes the use of the Unicode Standard, freely-available specifications and data that form the foundation for software internationalization in all major operating systems, search applications and the web.

The Unicode Consortium is open to all and comprises individuals, companies, academic institutions and governments. Members include Adobe, Apple, Emojipedia, Facebook, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Netflix, Oracle and SAP, among others. For more information, please visit http://www.unicode.org.

Adopt-A-Character Grant to Support Maya Inscriptional Hieroglyphs

The Adopt-a-Character Program is awarding the third in a series of grants to support the encoding of Maya hieroglyphs and their study by researchers. This grant is a continuation of earlier AAC-funded efforts to incorporate information from Maya codices into a multidimensional database. The work in 2019 will focus on hieroglyphs inscribed on monuments, and will fund work to advance the understanding of the corpus of inscriptional hieroglyphs by including this dataset in the multidimensional database developed for the Maya script. This work will further understanding of an appropriate encoding model for these complex hieroglyphs and will also provide support for new research work on the Maya script through the updated database.

The work will be led by Dr. Gabrielle Vail (Research Labs of Archaeology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Anthropology Program, University of South Florida, St. Petersburg) under the direction of Dr. Deborah Anderson (SEI, UC Berkeley).

The image included in this announcement is text from a lintel from the Maya site of Yaxchilan, Mexico. Photo by Gabrielle Vail.

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Over 136,000 characters are available for adoption, to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages

Unicode Emoji 11.0 characters now ready for adoption!

The 157 new Emoji are now available for adoption, to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages.

The main goal of the Unicode Consortium is to enable modern software and computing systems to support the widest range of human languages, present and past. There are approximately 7,000 living human languages, but fewer than 100 of these languages are well-supported on computers, mobile phones, and other devices. Adopt-a-character donations are used to improve Unicode support for digitally disadvantaged languages, and to help preserve the world’s linguistic heritage.

For more information on the program, and to adopt a character, see the Adopt-a-Character Page.

And by the way, we have updated charts for the new emoji, with some fixed glyphs (thanks to Emojipedia!).

Adopt-A-Character Grant to Support Three Historic Scripts

The Adopt-a-Character Program has awarded a grant to support development of proposals for encoding the following three historic scripts in the Unicode Standard:

• Book Pahlavi, an Aramaic-based script important to Zoroastrian and Parsi communities worldwide
• Persian Siyaq Numbers, a numerical system used in Iran from the 9th to 20th centuries for accounting and administration
• Uighur, a script used in the region spanning Uzbekistan to Mongolia from the 8th to 19th century.

The work will be done by Anshuman Pandey under the direction of Deborah Anderson (SEI, UC Berkeley) and Rick McGowan (Unicode Consortium).

Over 130,000 characters are available for adoption, to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages.

Gold Sponsor JMP Software

The Unicode Consortium is pleased to announce that JMP is now a gold sponsor for:

JMP's  sponsorship directly funds the work of the Unicode Consortium in enabling modern software and computing systems to support the widest range of human languages. There are approximately 7,000 living human languages. Fewer than 100 of these languages are well-supported on computers, mobile phones, and other devices. AAC donations are used to improve support for digitally disadvantaged languages, and to help preserve the world’s linguistic heritage. 

Scientific advances, engineering breakthroughs and statistical discoveries: Clarity comes to those who explore data visually and interactively with statistical software from JMP. That’s why we adopted the lightbulb — to represent the aha moments scientists, engineers and other data explorers experience. From its beginning, JMP has connected statistics with data visualization for data analysis, later adding design of experiments, predictive modeling, and quality, reliability, and consumer research analysis. Unicode allows us to focus on statistical discovery rather than on character set differences among the seven languages our software supports or on multiple operating systems. That’s another reason we decided to support Unicode’s work, as explained in this post. — JMP

The Unicode Consortium thanks JMP for their support!

All sponsors are listed on Sponsors of Adopted Characters. More than 128,000 other characters are available for adoption — see Adopt a Character. 

Gold Sponsor discourse.org

The Unicode Consortium is pleased to announce that discourse.org is now a gold sponsor for:

discourse.org's  sponsorship directly funds the work of the Unicode Consortium in enabling modern software and computing systems to support the widest range of human languages. There are approximately 7,000 living human languages. Fewer than 100 of these languages are well-supported on computers, mobile phones, and other devices. AAC donations are used to improve support for digitally disadvantaged languages, and to help preserve the world’s linguistic heritage. 

Discourse is the 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet. It works as a mailing list, discussion forum, long-form chat room, and more! Install it yourself, or try our managed hosting service. As a team discussion platform, emoji (and Unicode) are essential to the Discourse mission. Thanks to the efforts of the greater community, Discourse has already been translated into 87 languages and counting. We’re thrilled to support the Unicode Consortium’s mission of making all software available in every language. — discourse.org

The Unicode Consortium thanks discourse.org for their support!

All sponsors are listed on Sponsors of Adopted Characters. More than 128,000 other characters are available for adoption — see Adopt a Character. 

Gold Sponsor dtSearch Corp.

The Unicode Consortium is pleased to announce that dtSearch Corp. is now a gold sponsor for:

dtSearch Corp.'s  sponsorship directly funds the work of the Unicode Consortium in enabling modern software and computing systems to support the widest range of human languages. There are approximately 7,000 living human languages. Fewer than 100 of these languages are well-supported on computers, mobile phones, and other devices. AAC donations are used to improve support for digitally disadvantaged languages, and to help preserve the world’s linguistic heritage. 

dtSearch Corp. appreciates the critical role that the Unicode Standard has played in making search possible across so many of the world's languages. The recent Adopt-a-Character grants to support encoding Mayan Script and Egyptian Hieroglyphs demonstrate how the Unicode Consortium's continuing efforts further the preservation and sharing of human knowledge. — dtSearch Corp.

The Unicode Consortium thanks dtSearch Corp. for their support!

All sponsors are listed on Sponsors of Adopted Characters. More than 128,000 other characters are available for adoption — see Adopt a Character. 

Adopt-A-Character Grant to Support Three Historic Scripts

The Adopt-a-Character Program has awarded a grant to support further development of the following three historic scripts in the Unicode Standard:

• Dhives Akuru, a Brahmi-based script formerly used to write the Maldivian language in the Maldive islands
• Elymaic, an Aramaic-based script formerly used in the region southeast of the Tigris river in Iran
• Khwarezmian, a script formerly used in the northern part of Uzbekistan and the adjacent areas of Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan

This grant will fund the development of proposals for encoding scripts that can be included in the Unicode Standard. The work will be done by Anshuman Pandey under the direction of Deborah Anderson (SEI, UC Berkeley) and Rick McGowan (Unicode Consortium).

Over 100,000 characters are available for adoption, to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages.

Gold Sponsor MediaLab inc.

The Unicode Consortium is pleased to announce that MediaLab, Inc. is now a gold sponsor for:

MediaLab, Inc.'s  sponsorship directly funds the work of the Unicode Consortium in enabling modern software and computing systems to support the widest range of human languages. There are approximately 7,000 living human languages. Fewer than 100 of these languages are well-supported on computers, mobile phones, and other devices. AAC donations are used to improve support for digitally disadvantaged languages, and to help preserve the world’s linguistic heritage. 

The Unicode Consortium thanks MediaLab, Inc. for their support!

All sponsors are listed on Sponsors of Adopted Characters. More than 128,000 other characters are available for adoption — see Adopt a Character.   

Gold Sponsor Elastic

The Unicode Consortium is pleased to announce that Elastic is now a gold sponsor for:

Elastic's  sponsorship directly funds the work of the Unicode Consortium in enabling modern software and computing systems to support the widest range of human languages. There are approximately 7,000 living human languages. Fewer than 100 of these languages are well-supported on computers, mobile phones, and other devices. AAC donations are used to improve support for digitally disadvantaged languages, and to help preserve the world’s linguistic heritage. 

Elastic builds software to make data usable in real time and at scale for search, logging, security, and analytics use cases. Founded in 2012, Elastic develops the open source Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash), X-Pack (commercial features), and Elastic Cloud (a SaaS offering). When Elastic Founder and CEO Shay Banon found out about the Unicode adoption program, he had a cool idea: why not allow every engineer at Elastic (as well as other teammates within the company) to choose and adopt a character? Check out this blog. — Elastic

The Unicode Consortium thanks Elastic for their support!

All sponsors are listed on Sponsors of Adopted Characters. More than 128,000 other characters are available for adoption — see Adopt a Character.   

Gold Sponsor Avocados from Mexico

The Unicode Consortium is pleased to announce that Avocados from Mexico is now a gold sponsor for:

Avocados from Mexico’s sponsorship directly funds the work of the Unicode Consortium in enabling modern software and computing systems to support the widest range of human languages. There are approximately 7,000 living human languages. Fewer than 100 of these languages are well-supported on computers, mobile phones, and other devices. AAC donations are used to improve support for digitally disadvantaged languages, and to help preserve the world’s linguistic heritage.

Avocados From Mexico are healthy, always in season and a delicious way to elevate go-to dishes into a nutritious meal. They provide naturally good fats, nearly 20 vitamins and minerals,  are cholesterol- and sodium-free, making this fresh fruit a heart-healthy fruit. You can find more information and recipe ideas at AvocadosFromMexico.com. 

—Avocados from Mexico

The Unicode Consortium thanks Avocados from Mexico for their support!

All sponsors are listed on Sponsors of Adopted Characters. More than 128,000 other characters are available for adoption — see Adopt a Character.   

Gold Sponsor CSRA

The Unicode Consortium is pleased to announce that CSRA is now a gold sponsor for:

CSRA’s sponsorship directly funds the work of the Unicode Consortium in enabling modern software and computing systems to support the widest range of human languages. There are approximately 7,000 living human languages. Fewer than 100 of these languages are well-supported on computers, mobile phones, and other devices. AAC donations are used to improve support for digitally disadvantaged languages, and to help preserve the world’s linguistic heritage.

CSRA is a leading provider of next-generation technology to its public-sector customers. The company’s sponsorship of the U.S. flag emoji is symbolic of the nexus between its IT services and its customers, as featured in an article by NextGov.

The Unicode Consortium thanks CSRA for their support!

All sponsors are listed on Sponsors of Adopted Characters. More than 128,000 other characters are available for adoption — see Adopt a Character.

Gold Sponsor ☮.com

The Unicode Consortium is pleased to announce that ☮.com is now a gold sponsor for:

☮.com’s sponsorship directly funds the work of the Unicode Consortium in enabling modern software and computing systems to support the widest range of human languages. There are approximately 7,000 living human languages. Fewer than 100 of these languages are well-supported on computers, mobile phones, and other devices. AAC donations are used to improve support for digitally disadvantaged languages, and to help preserve the world’s linguistic heritage.

☮.com proudly supports Unicode's efforts because those efforts promote wider and clearer communication to prevent misunderstandings that can cause conflict, violence, and suffering anywhere around the world.

The Unicode Consortium thanks ☮.com for their support!

All sponsors are listed on Sponsors of Adopted Characters. More than 128,000 other characters are available for adoption — see Adopt a Character.

Adopt-A-Character Grant to Support Indic Scripts

The Adopt-a-Character program has awarded a grant to support further development of the following four Indic scripts in the Unicode Standard:

• Hanifi Rohingya, a script in current use in Myanmar and Bangladesh
• Nandinagari, a Brahmi-based historic script formerly used in South India
• Old Sogdian, a group of historic scripts formerly used in Kazakhstan, Pakistan, and Western China
• Sogdian, derived from Old Sogdian, a group of historic scripts formerly used in Central Asia

The goal of this grant is to enable the development of encoding proposals that can be included in the Unicode Standard. The work will be done by Anshuman Pandey under the direction of Deborah Anderson (SEI, UC Berkeley) and Rick McGowan (Unicode Consortium).