Three Speech Bubbles

It labels several speakers in one conversation. Unicode’s names list pairs two bubbles with “chat” and three with “conference.” The exact digital ancestor of 🗫 is Wingdings glyph 0095, a mark in a symbol font. A 2011 proposal names that glyph “conference” and says Unicode encoding would make privately assigned font symbols searchable and portable. Wingdings first appeared with Windows 3.1 in 1992.

The history of speech bubbles reaches back much further than modern comics. Mesoamerican speech scrolls are attested around 600–900 CE; a Greek-text mural at Capitolias, in modern Jordan, dates to the 2nd century. Western pictures used text labels to show speech by at least the 13th century. Printed balloons returned in 18th-century broadsides and became increasingly standardized in 20th-century comics. U.S. and Japanese comic traditions use their own conventions for speech and thought bubbles, so 🗫 suggests several speakers without carrying a fixed emotional tone.