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The emojination website mentions UTC and ESC. UTC in this context certainly means Unicode Technical Committee. And after a bit of Googling it seems that ESC is the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee.

Some of the suggested emojis are marked as UTC rejected, some as ESC rejected or ESC pushback. Does it mean that both UTC and ESC has to approve each suggested emoji?

And is there a place to see the reason for rejection and a place to see what kind of pushback they are receiving?

It's for "Emoji SubCommittee" (aka ESC).

Unicode Emoji Subcommittee:
The Unicode Emoji Subcommittee is responsible for the following:
- Updating, revising, and extending emoji documents such as UTS #51: Unicode Emoji and Unicode Emoji Charts.
- Taking input from various sources and reviewing requests for new emoji characters.
- Creating proposals for the Unicode Technical Committee regarding additional emoji characters and new emoji-related mechanisms.
- Investigating longer-term mechanisms for supporting emoji as images (stickers).

From https://unicode.org/emoji/techindex.html

Edit: Welp, the parent comment was asking what "ESC" stands for, but has now been updated, so this comment is now outdated :)

Sorry, yeah I was originally asking about what ESC stands for but found some info shortly after and updated my comment. But I appreciate the additional info anyways :)

It's complicated. So this mainly boils down to the relationship between UTC and ESC.

ESC contributes to UTC, along with other groups (e.g. Scripts Ad Hoc Group or IRG) or other individuals (you can submit documents to UTC [1]), and technically UTC has a right to reject ESC contributions. In reality however ESC manages a huge volume of emoji proposals to UTC and distills them down to a packaged submission, so UTC rarely outright rejects ESC contributions. After all ESC is a part of UTC so there is a huge overlap anyway (e.g. Mark Davis is the Unicode Consortium and ESC chair). "UTC rejected" emojis thus generally come from the direct proposal to UTC.

You can see a list of emoji requests [2] but it lacks much information. This lack of transparency in the ESC process is well known and was most directly criticized by contributing experts in 2017 [3]. ESC responded [4] that there are so many flawed proposals (with no regards to the submission criteria [5]) that it is infeasible to document all of them. IMHO it's not a very satisfactory answer, but still understandable.

[1] https://www.unicode.org/L2/

[2] https://www.unicode.org/emoji/emoji-requests.html

[3] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17147-emoji-subcommittee.pd...

[4] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17192-response-cmts.pdf

[5] https://www.unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html

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