The intended meaning would have been to point attention upward, indicate βlook above,β refer to a previous message, select an item, emphasize a heading, or signal βnumber one.β Online, a solid up-pointing backhand could have fit forum replies, meme captions, comment-thread references, upvote-like gestures, and the slang use of pointing at text as if saying βthis.β People may have wanted it because pointing hands are useful interface and conversation symbols, and because older typographic manicules and legacy symbol fonts included many directional hand shapes. In Apple-style concept imagery, if it had been mocked up as an emoji, it would likely have appeared as a simplified back-of-hand gesture with the index finger extended upward, possibly rendered as a dark filled silhouette or as a shaded hand icon rather than a yellow expressive emoji. Because there was no widely released Apple emoji under this exact name, any colorful iOS-style depiction should be treated as conceptual rather than official.
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Emoji History The emoji code/ image log of changes.
This emoji was one of the "suggested emojis" the Unicode group unveiled in June 2014 [article], however, it has been, and still is, up to the companies who support emoji in their operating systems to provide not only images but also an algorithm to replace the emoji code into the emoji image.
