Fix a shameful Unicode Emoji omission: Maritime Signal Flags!

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Background:

When you’re the admiral of an 18th-century navy and you want to communicate with the many other boats in your fleet, what are you going to do? Obviously you can’t just send text messages to the other captains, since you’re in the middle of the ocean and won’t have any cell reception.

The answer is: you’ll use one of the various systems of maritime signal flags (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_maritime_signal_flags). Basically, each flag is a letter (or word), and you string them up somewhere on your ship where they can be seen. Easy!

Fig. 1: Signal flags. You can spell out your favorite words—or even your LEAST favorite words—with these.

The Issue:

Weirdly, despite the proliferation of bafflingly specific emoji (a few of which appear in Figure 2), the relatively straightforward-seeming “signal flags” option never made it in.

Fig. 2: The currently supported set of emoji includes many extremely specific icons (like “just a nose,” left middle), but no signal flags.

Proposal:

This proposal is quick: let’s just add all the maritime signal flags! Depending on which flags you include, this will require between ~40 and ~100 new symbols, which is not an unreasonable addition to the 3,700+ existing emoji.

We might initially be tempted to re-use certain national flags, but it turns out that although there are some close matches, there aren’t any exact matches. The Flag of Scotland (🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿) is the best match (to the “M” signal flag: Figure 3), but it’s a different aspect ratio (i.e, it isn’t exactly square).

Fig. 3: “M” is a close match for Scotland (🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿), and “K” could be a rotated Ukrainian flag (🇺🇦): except this doesn’t help us, since you can’t usually easily rotate emoji! “O” is sort of similar to the flag of Bhutan (🇧🇹) if you remove the dragon, but this doesn’t help much either. We’ll definitely need a completely new set of symbols.

We also probably want a new set of symbols since we can’t 100% rely on the national flags never changing.

Conclusion:

Write to the Unicode Emoji Supreme Council Of Elders today and request that these signal flags be added to the next version of emoji! We should at least get these flags in before like, “a duck smoking a cigarette” or “a squid fighting a whale” get added.

PROS: If it’s your first day on the job flying signal flags, and you forget which flag is which, you will now be able to text a friend and get the correct signal flag sequence as a text message! Whew!

CONS: Will probably add something like five megabytes of additional data to each emoji font set.

Originally published 2024-07-08.