Unicode's "Pile of Poo" character

For many years, most of the Internet ran on ASCII, a character set that had a limited number of accents and diacriticals, and which didn't support non-Roman script at all. Unicode, a massive, sprawling replacement, has room for all sorts of characters and alphabets, and can be extended with "private use areas" that include support for Klingon.

But for all that, I never dreamt that Unicode was so vast as to contain a special character for a "pile of poo."

Name: PILE OF POO
Block: Miscellaneous Symbols And Pictographs
Category: Symbol, Other [So]
Index entries: POO, PILE OF
Comments: dog dirt
Version: Unicode 6.0.0 (October 2010)
HTML Entity: 💩

Here is "Pile of Poo" in whatever font your browser renders this page in: 💩

Unicode Character 'PILE OF POO' (U+1F4A9)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Funny • happy mutants • languages • orthography • standards • typography • web theory

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http://goodsharer.com/ Aloisius

Pile of poo is an emoji character. I believe when they mapped emoji over to Unicode, pile of poo came with. I believe you can thank the Japanese for this one.
- Shibi_SF
  
  Domo arigato for the kusai unko!
- http://isthisreallynecessary.com someToast
  
  And for the iPhone lock screen… : )
  
  http://flickr.com/sometoast/4735407064/
http://www.epinardscaramel.com TokenFrenchDude

What ?? There’s a pile of poo character ? And here I am waiting for them to make a “stupid crow” …. (see http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IdiotCrows )
Sam Ley

It truly is a universal language. The little “smell lines” convey a sense of crappyness to all mankind. Let this be a lesson of sharing and unity between all peoples. *tears welling*
- dr_awkward
  
  “Smell Lines”? I always thought it was steam from a *fresh, warm* pile of poo.
  - robotnik
    
    “This poo is cold.”
    - Donald Petersen
      
      Cold poop is less stinky. The lines convey both temperature and aroma. Now that’s good design.
http://i.doubt.it Sergei Richard

It’s a luck charm in Japan, isn’t it?

So. what fonts support defecating in mid-sentence?
http://twitter.com/richboakes Rich Boakes

See also: http://
- Mark Lee McDonald
  
  Ah yes, good old poop.la. I
Rossi

It renders as an empty square for me in Chrome and IE. Renders with the HTML code in Firefox. No poo for me.
- bcsizemo
  
  Same here. FF 10.0 and all I get is a little box that has 01F4A9 in it…
- howaboutthisdangit
  
  Empty square in Opera 11.50, too.
- SamSam
  
  No poo in the very latest Chrome, Firefox or Safari.
  
  Wonder what browser Cory is using, or if he installed extended unicode special.
  - http://twitter.com/mathew mathew
    
    There’s a bug in WebKit that makes it not render properly on the Mac. I reported the bug to the Chromium project back in 2010…
    
    http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=62435
    
    …and it was reported back to Apple. There’s apparently going to be a fix, but right now the code isn’t shipped and only works for Lion and up.
    
    Pile of poo works fine in Chrome on Linux, though, if you have a suitable font installed.
    - GIFtheory
      
      Renders fine for me on Safari on Lion, in which it is rendered as swirl of poo, not unlike soft-serve chocolate ice cream, rendered with the most sublime gradient, such as to mimic being tickled by the light of dawn; framed roughly in an equilateral triangle, with large, button eyes and a perfect, D-shaped smile. I kid you not.
- FourFeetOfCurl
  
  You need to install the Pile Of Poo unicode font on your system. It doesn’t matter what browser you’re using.
  
  Why haven’t you installed the Pile Of Poo font yet? Everyone else is doing it.
  
  Here is an umbrella: ☂
  - Rossi
    
    I can see the umbrella!
  - MarcVader
    
    ❄
Mujokan

Of my ability to understand Japanese, I would credit about half to the comic “Crayon Shinchan”. From that fount of cultural knowledge, I am aware that feces twisted into a kind of pyramidal snake is a “thing” in Japan. So I thought this might have something to do with Japanese unicode, and wasn’t surprised to read comments to that effect.
- Jorpho
  
  The neat pyramidal shape baffled me for years as well.
  - Oxperiment
    
    There is a bit in “The Taste of Tea” where a character takes exactly that kind of shit on what turns out to be a bare skull. It’s an extremely Japanese movie.
    - Donald Petersen
      
      That’s quite a skill. I generally can’t pull it off at the soft-serve machine.
- http://www.facebook.com/sean.sakamoto1 Sean Sakamoto
  
  I just moved back to NYC from Japan. While we lived in Japan, those poop charms were everywhere. My son liked these poop superballs that you could collect.
  
  http://www.polyvore.com/unchi_poop_super_ball_individual/thing?id=40110667
http://www.iandicomputing.com Clifton

I suppose you need a font updated after October 2010 for this to work…
Ashen Victor

So, how do i get to see a pile of shit in my browser without having to tune Fox News?
guanto

Oddly enough, the “font [my] browser renders this page in” is Georgia, probably because that’s what BB’s stylesheet specifies.

Edit: For those who would like to see it and have an iPhone/iPod Touch, mobile Safari displays it just fine (Opera Mini doesn’t) — mine’s set to Japanese though but I don’t think that matters.
- OgilvyTheAstronomer
  
  Just fine, except for the fact that it’s actually *smiling*… ಠ_ಠ
  - MarcVader
    
    I approve of your look of disapproval. ^_^
theophrastvs

Unicode character 💩 shall heretofore become the standard emblem of Unicode in general. sine-die. selah. withal. exeunt. [exits stage left]
Guest

empty square in chrome 16.0.912.77 using the font that boingboing has asked my browser to use. I’d really like to see this in the wild :(
kostia

Ever since iOS started supporting emoji characters you see this a LOT in app store reviews. Apparently the people who have no better way than a string of
- OgilvyTheAstronomer
  
  They do say an image is worth a thousand words…
DewiMorgan

In Furcadia, we originally used bitmapped fonts, but eventually moved to truetype font, “Fixedsys Excelsior 2″ https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Fixedsys_Excelsior#Adult_content

Because of this font’s unusual characters in the “private use area”, we now filter out certain characters from being used in names and when users have enabled the profanity filter. These filtered characters are the two penises, large and small (U+E1CE, U+E1CF); and the *multiple* styles of steaming poop (U+E188 to U+E18A).

I guess on reading this post, I now know there’s another codepoint we need to filter, too.

Also in that font’s private use area is a selection of pixels that overprint, allowing the user to emulate any character that can be displayed in 8×8 pixels.

Amusingly, early Windows’ which had no coverage of the “private use” area in their default fonts would default to this font as the only one that could cover it, so people with Furcadia installed would be the only ones who could see those characters.
- SamSam
  
  U+E1CE seems to be an O with a bar over it, according to http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/E1CE/browsertest.htm, and U+E1CF is an O with a upward curve over it. Similarly for your other examples…
  
  I wanted to see the penises….
  
  The pile o’ poo can be seen on that page, though, for all of us with normal browsers that don’t render Cory’s attempt above: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1F4A9/browsertest.htm
  - DewiMorgan
    
    If you want to view it as I described, simply install the font “fixedsys excelsior 2″, then view the font in your favorite font viewer, such as Windows’ Charmap.
    - SamSam
      
      Oh, I see, I didn’t know about the “private use” area of a font. Weird.
- http://cnoocy.livejournal.com/ cnoocy
  
  That’s actually how private use characters are supposed to work. The codepoints are there to allow users of the standard to handle characters that aren’t encoded in the standard.
  - DewiMorgan
    
    Yes, the private use area is exactly what the name implies, so I felt no need to explain it. But I have probably entirely missed your point, somewhere.
solitaire

I’m a big fan of the ‘cat faces’ section like U+1F638
http://www.facebook.com/cameron.abides Cameron Abides

or in Gmail chat you can find an animated poo with ~@~
Jorpho

“1F4A9″ cries out for some kind of snappy mnemonic.
Punchcard

Awesome! I now have a new alternative for all the excrement based names I give temporary files I don’t care about keeping.
Another Kevin

My guess: It’s a hoax. Because the code charts at unicode.org don’t have it.
- chenille
  
  It’s in http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F300.pdf. Note that’s a pdf.
  
  There’s a lot of interesting things in there: moons with faces, cherry blossoms, roasted sweet potato, carp streamers, a trumpet, an octopus, dromedary and bactrian camels, a frog face, a bikini, men holding hands, a baby angel, a bicep, a broken heart, a money bag…take a look.
- Michael Everson
  
  Your guess is wrong. http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F300.pdf
http://twitter.com/antoin Antoin O Lachtnain

It was typographer and alphabetician Michael Everson, Irish representative to ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2, who proposed that character name, which expresses the intent of the character (while other euphemisms were proposed, he tells me, none were nearly as apt).Note that this is the second scatological character encoded (ignoring some CJK Ideograms). The first was U+1313D EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH F052, which Everson also helped to encode.
http://twitter.com/antoin Antoin O Lachtnain

The character is listed on the Unicode site at http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F300.pdf
Andrew Pam

If you can’t see this or other unusual characters, you need at least one font installed that actually has those characters in it. GNU Unifont is a good starting point: http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html

You may also want, for example, the “Symbola” and “Unidings” fonts: http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/
- aeryn
  
  Thank you!
Frode Helland

Here’s a relevant type review of Apple Color Emoji by Sii Daniels: http://typographica.org/2012/typeface-reviews/apple-color-emoji/
Bob Spence

Try: http://
danegeld

Ok, everyone with Mac Lion : you type option+D83DDCA9 as so:
teapot

Kind of stupid that the poo displays nicely through Safari on Mac, but not Firefox…. but at least it provides me with the long-desired option to “look up shit”. Also if you look up shit, the poo gets a little speech bubble. Talking shit?