Most of its characters were taken from Zapf Dingbats; it was the Unicode block to have imported characters from a specific typeface; Unicode later adopted a policy that excluded symbols with "no demonstrated need or strong desire to exchange in plain text",[3] and thus no further dingbat typefaces were encoded until Webdings and Wingdings were encoded in Version 7.0.
The block, originally named "Zapf Dingbats", was added to the Unicode Standard in October 1991, with the release of version 1.0.
[6][7] 66 standardized variants are defined to specify emoji-style (like U+FE0F VS16) or text presentation (like U+FE0E VS15) for 33 characters.
The Dingbats block has four emoji that represent hands.
The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Dingbats block: