Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs is a Unicode block containing meteorological and astronomical symbols, emoji characters[3] largely for compatibility with Japanese telephone carriers' implementations of Shift JIS, and characters originally from the Wingdings and Webdings fonts found in Microsoft Windows.
The block contains 637 emoji[4][5] and has 312 standardized variants defined to specify emoji-style (U+FE0F VS16) or text presentation (U+FE0E VS15) for 156 base characters.
[10] This was the result of lobbying by Katrina Parrott, whose daughter came up with the idea after being unable to send emojis that looked like her.
[12] The following table shows the full combinations of each of the five modifiers with all the "human emoji" characters in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block.
The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block: