Ringing Bell refers to a proposed or discussed emoji-style concept for a bell actively making sound, distinct from the already approved bell emoji. In Unicode and emoji discussions, ideas like this often appeared as requests for more expressive variants of existing symbols, especially during the period when many 2014-era emoji candidates were being compared against Japanese carrier sets, Apple-style artwork, and common messaging needs. The concept was not approved as a separate official emoji character, likely because the existing Bell emoji could already represent alerts, notifications, school bells, alarms, and attention-getting sounds.
Its intended meanings would have included an incoming notification, an alarm going off, a call for attention, celebration, a service bell, or the phrase βring the bell.β Online, it could have been useful for meme captions, reminder posts, YouTube-style βhit the bellβ subscription language, breaking-news alerts, or jokes about someone being loud or dramatic. People may have wanted it because a static bell can feel passive, while a ringing bell with motion marks would more clearly communicate urgency, noise, or an active alert.
No official Apple or Unicode design for a separate Ringing Bell emoji is known, but proposal imagery or mockups would likely have resembled a gold or yellow bell with curved motion lines on both sides. It may have looked similar to Appleβs glossy bell style, possibly tilted as if vibrating, with a clapper visible and small sound marks to show ringing. As a lost or unencoded concept, Ringing Bell is best understood as an expressive variant idea rather than a standard emoji, overlapping heavily with π Bell, π Bell With Slash, alarm symbols, and notification icons.
Disqus Leave a comment!
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.
