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What Does Apple's Strange New Emoji Mean?

"I'm going to Target, want anything?"

By Rain Noe - September 22, 2015

in Visual Communication

Jeremy Burge is the founder of the Emojipedia index, so naturally he'd be the man to discover this: Apple has designed a rather weird emoji, as yet unreleased, but tucked away in the developer preview of the forthcoming iOS 9.1 update.

Emojis are typically designed within the Unicode Consortium, but as Burge points out, this is a custom job apparently designed by Apple. Here's what it looks like:

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Burge, Redditors and others are wondering just what the heck it means. To be clear, this is not an icon representing an app; it's an emoji meant to be placed into a conversation to communicate something. But what?

The consensus seems to be that it's an eyeball inside of a speech bubble. The expected jibes have surfaced—it refers to CBS, Sauron, the Illuminati, or the fact that the NSA is watching you, say the jokers—though more sober commenters speculate that it simply means "I see," as in "I see what you are saying." Others think it means "Bullseye," and still others wonder if "Apple might have some forthcoming feature for which this emoji is an indicator."

Any guesses?

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Jomy Muttathil

9 years ago

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It means that your iMessage has been seen by the receiver.

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Kin B

9 years ago

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I definitely see the younger generation using this to simply say, "someone is watching my texts, watch what you say"

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Jason Pokines

9 years ago

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Video chat.

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Noodle Time

9 years ago

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maybe a severed eyball, with the nerves/muscles still attached?

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Zachary Martz

9 years ago

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How about "iChat" ...

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