Apple reveals all the new emojis coming to your iPhone with iOS 11.1 - including swearing, mermaid and 'I love you'
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Apple has offered a sneak peak at the hundreds of new emoji coming to iPhone and iPad with the release of iOS 11.1 .
These include a range of new faces, including a swearing face, a silly face, a face making the "shhh" gesture and a face with a monocle, as well as new gender-neutral characters.
There are new clothing options for winter, including a trench coat, hat, gloves and scarf, and food types, such as pie, broccoli, dimsum and takeaway.
New animals include giraffe, hedgehog, cricket and dinosaur, and new mythical creatures include mermaid, wizard, fairy and vampire.
Also included in the update is the "love you" gesture, designed after the “I love you” hand sign in American sign language.
The new emoji are adapted from approved characters in Unicode 10, and also include characters announced on World Emoji Day like woman breastfeeding , woman with a headscarf (hijabi) , and "shocked face with exploding head" (mind blown).
In total, 56 new emoji have been approved by the Unicode Consortium, the non-profit organisation that approves new emoji characters for public use.
Other notable additions include "bearded man", "grinning face with star eyes", "smiling face with hand putting on makeup", and "face with open mouth vomiting".
(Image: PA)
The consortium approves the rough images, but companies such as Apple and Google are free to create their own versions of each emoji.
Earlier this week WhatsApp unveiled its own range of emoji, which are nearly identical to those created by Apple.
Only a few small differences give away the update - for instance, the water pistol has turned orange, the ghost emoji no longer has lopsided eyes and the frying egg is now double-yolked.
While emojis were first introduced as a bit of frivolous fun, they have grown to become the fastest growing language in history, and have become a central part of modern digital communication.
Celebrities including Kim Kardashian and Justin Bieber have launched their own range of personalised icons, while the official Unicode standard now includes more than 2,500 icons.
"As a visual language emoji has already far eclipsed hieroglyphics, its ancient Egyptian precursor which took centuries to develop," said Professor Vyv Evans from Bangor University.