Apple Confirmed To Add A Spock Emoji To Next iOS Update

Leonard Nimoy's Spock has always had a place in our hearts. After his recent passing, people around the world exchanged Vulcan salutes in his honor. Soon, you'll be able to send a Star Trek inspired signal to a friend with Apple's latest emoji. Apple's upcoming iOS updates are due to include a Spock emoji! So, you send a Vulcan salute and tell all of your friends to "live long and prosper."

The four-fingered, split like a "V" salute is the customary salutation of Star Trek's Vulcan people. Its appeal goes beyond the Trekkie fan base, and it's a pretty versatile emoji. I can envision this little emoji as the new "ttyl" and an appropriate way to sign off from business group chats and Tinder chats, alike.

The salute was recognized back in 2014 as an official Unicode symbol by the Unicode Consortium, but it must be adapted by distinct tech companies before it can be widely used. The Unicode Consortium actually added a whopping 2,834 new characters last year, and obviously there aren't that many available iMessage. That's why it's so exciting that Apple will be snagging the Spock emoji; now it can be widely used as an online emoji.

Just to clarify, as I feel there is a bit of an ongoing misconception, the term "emoji" was never derived from "emote" or "emotion". Emoji is actually a Japanese term. "E" means picture, while "moji" means letter or character. So emoji are simply picture characters.

The Spock emoji will be coming to iOS 8.3 and OS X 10.10.3.

Source: Quartz