Every New Emoji This Year: A Roundup of Emoji 17 and 18
The 17 new emoji from Emoji 17.0 and 18.0, listed with their names, how people may use them, and when they might show up on your phone.
Emoji grow a little every year. Someone submits a new emoji to the Unicode Consortium, it goes through review to become a candidate, and it is usually confirmed as an official emoji around fall, together with a new version of Unicode.
This article collects every emoji added in the two most recent versions in EmojiCanvas data, Emoji 17.0 (2025) and Emoji 18.0 (2026). The names follow the official English names in the Unicode data (CLDR). Variants that only change skin tone or gender are left out, and only completely new designs are counted.
Most devices can't display these emoji properly yet. That's why this site shows emoji added from Emoji 16.0 on as Noto emoji images instead of characters. If an emoji looks like a box in the list below, check the picture on its own emoji page.
9 new emoji in Emoji 18.0 (2026)
This is the newest version. It brings one face, two hands, and a good mix of animals, food and objects.
- Cracking face: A face with cracks running through it. It's a good fit for feeling mentally fried, or for falling apart behind a smile.
- Leftwards thumb sign: A hand with the thumb pointing left.
- Rightwards thumb sign: The partner to , with the thumb pointing the other way.
- Monarch butterfly: The classic North American butterfly with orange wings and black markings. It points to one particular species, more specific than the existing 🦋 (butterfly).
- Pickle: A cucumber pickle. It seems likely to show up a lot in talk about burgers and sandwiches.
- Lighthouse: Could be used as a symbol of seaside trips, guidance and hope.
- Meteor: A meteor streaking across the sky. If the existing 🌠 (shooting star) has the sparkly feel of a star you wish on, this one is closer to a chunk of rock flying in from space.
- Eraser: Its uses range wide, from school and studying to "let's pretend that never happened."
- Net with handle: Suits bug catching, or saying you've "caught" something.
8 new emoji in Emoji 17.0 (2025)
Emoji 17.0 was announced in September 2025 together with Unicode 17.0. It spans faces, imaginary creatures, sea life, natural disasters and even musical instruments.
- Distorted face: A face that looks twisted and warped. Good for expressing confusion or a dizzy head.
- Fight cloud: The cloud of dust that appears in cartoons when several people tangle in a fight. It will likely be used for arguments, chaos and total mayhem.
- Hairy creature: A legendary creature covered in hair, an emoji that brings Bigfoot or Sasquatch to mind.
- 🧑🩰 Ballet dancer: An emoji made by combining existing ones, a dancer with no gender specified.
- Orca: A killer whale with a black body and white patches. It is distinct from the existing 🐋 (whale) and 🐬 (dolphin).
- Landslide: Earth and rock pouring down. It could be used when sharing news of a disaster.
- Trombone: A brass instrument played by sliding the slide in and out. Plenty of people will probably link it to the "sad trombone" sound effect used to mark a failure.
- Treasure chest: A chest full of gold and jewels. Well suited to game rewards, unexpected luck and treasured memories.
For reference: Emoji 16.0 (2024)
A year earlier, Emoji 16.0 added (face with bags under eyes), (fingerprint), (leafless tree), (root vegetable), (harp), (shovel), (splatter) and the Sark flag. Of these, has already settled in fairly well as the emoji for being tired or pulling an all-nighter.
How might they be used?
An emoji's official name only describes its shape, and its real meaning gets decided by the people who use it. 🫠 (melting face) brings heat to mind from its shape alone, but in practice it more often means embarrassment and resignation. What follows is only a guess.
Faces and hands for expressing feelings
(cracking face) is the strongest candidate to be used a lot. When you bomb a test, on a Monday morning, or when more work than you can handle piles up, it's perfect in place of "my brain is fried." (distorted face) is also expected to express confusion, dizziness, or a bewildered "wait, what?"
(thumbs pointing sideways) have fun uses. You can use them like pointing at the person next to you, as in "look at this one" or "they did it," or put them before or after a sentence to point to the previous message or to move on to the next.
(fight cloud) is a good emoji to use in a group chat when opinions clash, in place of "things are going wild." It will probably be used more for playful commotion than for real fights.
Objects for situations and hobbies
(treasure chest) and (meteor) suit talk about games, fantasy and luck. 🧑🩰 (ballet dancer) and (trombone) fill a gap where there hadn't been a good emoji for performances and hobbies.
(eraser) could be used among students to mean "forget I said that" or "delete my cringe past," and (lighthouse) fits a message to someone you're grateful to, like "you're my lighthouse."
- When your brain has cracked
- When the group chat gets noisy
- ✨Unexpected luck, a lucky find
- For someone who lit your way
When will they reach your phone?
An emoji doesn't show up on your keyboard the moment it's confirmed. Companies such as Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft each have to make their own designs and ship them in an operating system update. So it usually takes a few months, and sometimes close to a year, from announcement to actually being usable.
Looking at recent years, the iPhone has often added new emoji in an iOS update around spring of the year after the announcement. Google Pixel uses its own font, so it's relatively quick, while Samsung Galaxy and other Android devices have to wait for the maker's updates and tend to be later. Windows is generally the slowest.
Emoji 17.0 may be visible on a device with the latest update, a little over a year after it was announced, but Emoji 18.0 was confirmed in 2026, so it will likely still show as a box on most devices. The most accurate way to learn about updates is to check each company's operating system update notes.
When you send a new emoji to someone, remember just one thing. Even if it looks fine on your screen, if the other person's device doesn't know it yet, it arrives as an empty box. For an important message, send it with an existing emoji or add the meaning in words.
Yearly updates
This article is rewritten every year when the new emoji are confirmed. When a new version comes out, we will swap the list and also sum up what the previous version's emoji actually came to mean.
Each emoji page on EmojiCanvas lists the version and year it was added. If you wonder when an emoji first came into use, you can check at the top of its page, and you can also see its pictures in three designs, Noto, Twemoji and Fluent.
Last checked 2026-10-22
