One-thirty Emoji

An analog clock face showing 1:30. Half past one is deep in the post-lunch zone. At 1:30 PM, the meal is over but the afternoon hasn't found its rhythm yet. At 1:30 AM, it's the thick of the night: the hour when late-night conversations are at their most honest and the distance between "one more drink" and "going home" collapses.

One of the 12 half-hour clock emojis inherited from Wingdings, Microsoft's 1990 decorative font. The Unicode Consortium included all 12 in Unicode 6.0 (2010) for backward compatibility.

Among the least-used emojis in existence, ranking in Unicode's Group 15. People who need to say 1:30 almost always use 🕐 or type it out. The half-hour clocks are buried on most keyboards, making them impractical for quick messaging.

• •🕜 exists because of a font. Wingdings included 12 half-hour clock faces as decorative symbols for print publishing. Nobody in 1990 imagined they'd become permanent Unicode characters on billions of phones.
• •The half-hour clock emojis are buried behind all 12 hourly clocks on Apple keyboards. On Android Gboard, they're interspersed logically. This keyboard difference is the main reason half-hour clocks are so rarely used.
• •1:30 PM falls in the heart of the post-prandial dip, the scientifically documented energy crash after eating. Your circadian rhythm and digestive system conspire to make this the sleepiest part of the workday.