X website reverts water pistol emoji to realistic gun

Users on Twitter/X have found that after six years, choosing the pistol emoji now shows an image of a gun instead of a water pistol.

The existence of any particular emoji is down to the Unicode Consortium and its annual decisions, rather than specific firms such as Apple, Google, or Twitter. Each company does its own graphic design representation, and today, X has demonstrated that by going against the industry's recognized standards.

According to Emojipedia, Twitter/X has updated its emoji design for the word "pistol," and made it into an image of a firearm.

The pistol appears to have become an official emoji around 2010, and Emojipedia has a chart showing its design from 2013 onwards. Originally, every firm showed the emoji as a firearm, except Microsoft, which designed it as a Buck Rogers-style ray gun.

In 2016, however, Apple changed it from a firearm to a water pistol. It was not the only firearm-related emoji change it did then, either.

By 2018, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Facebook, and Twitter had all agreed with Apple. Each pistol emoji was different, but each one was an image of a water pistol.

Twitter has not announced the change, and due to how emoji appearance is controlled by each platform, the old water pistol emoji still appears on the iOS Twitter app. But adding it through a browser gets the new gun design.

How the pistol emoji has changed over the years (Source: Emojipedia)

Reportedly, the new design began rolling out in a Twitter/X update on July 18, 2024. In July 2023, the company revamped emojis, including the "Pleading Face" one, but this appears to be the first intentional revision back to a previous design idea.

Separately, the Unicode Consortium has been considering proposals for new emoji. If passed, they will typically be added to Apple devices within a few months.