SoatDev IT Consulting
SoatDev IT Consulting
  • About us
  • Expertise
  • Services
  • How it works
  • Contact Us
  • News
  • July 23, 2024
  • Rss Fetcher
Vector collage of the X logo.
Image: The Verge

Years after Twitter replaced the pistol emoji with a green-and-orange water gun, X has decided to change it back to a regular handgun. An X employee announced the change in a post last week.

The company hasn’t explained the change, but it feels on-brand for Elon Musk’s social network. Twitter originally switched its emoji to display a water gun in 2018, following others like Google and Facebook. (Apple made the switch in 2016; Microsoft was a brief hold-out.)

We’ve embedded a screenshot of the X post, so you can see the gun image. (On some devices, the actual post still shows a water gun when embedded.)

Eventually, the Unicode Consortium, which decides which emoji get made in the first place, followed the platforms’ lead and officially renamed the pistol emoji as “water pistol”:

The Unicode website shows water pistol is the official short name for emoji #1121.
The current entry for the “water pistol” emoji. You can also find references to it here and here.

Emoji are universal insofar as they share common designations across platforms (U+1F52B is the water pistol), which are decided by the Unicode Consortium. But it’s up to each platform owner to decide how they’re visually represented. That’s how we got the Great Cheeseburger Emoji Debacle that was resolved in November 2017.

You’ll only see the gun if you’re looking at X on the web — as of this writing, it doesn’t appear to have updated in mobile versions of the app, though that’s apparently on its way at some point.

Previous Post
Next Post

Recent Posts

  • Microsoft’s Satya Nadella is choosing chatbots over podcasts
  • MIT disavows doctoral student paper on AI’s productivity benefits
  • Laser-powered fusion experiment more than doubles its power output
  • TechCrunch Week in Review: Coinbase gets hacked
  • Epic Games asks judge to force Apple to approve Fortnite

Categories

  • Industry News
  • Programming
  • RSS Fetched Articles
  • Uncategorized

Archives

  • May 2025
  • April 2025
  • February 2025
  • January 2025
  • December 2024
  • November 2024
  • October 2024
  • September 2024
  • August 2024
  • July 2024
  • June 2024
  • May 2024
  • April 2024
  • March 2024
  • February 2024
  • January 2024
  • December 2023
  • November 2023
  • October 2023
  • September 2023
  • August 2023
  • July 2023
  • June 2023
  • May 2023
  • April 2023

Tap into the power of Microservices, MVC Architecture, Cloud, Containers, UML, and Scrum methodologies to bolster your project planning, execution, and application development processes.

Solutions

  • IT Consultation
  • Agile Transformation
  • Software Development
  • DevOps & CI/CD

Regions Covered

  • Montreal
  • New York
  • Paris
  • Mauritius
  • Abidjan
  • Dakar

Subscribe to Newsletter

Join our monthly newsletter subscribers to get the latest news and insights.

© Copyright 2023. All Rights Reserved by Soatdev IT Consulting Inc.