Evolution of Emoji

Overview

Emoji are single-character ideograms (usually in color) encompassing a wide variety of images, from facial expressions to animals to food, which are typically used in telecommunications that are otherwise primarily text-based, such as texting or messaging. Each emoji is drawn on a small pixel grid, usually about the same size as a letter, number, or other Unicode symbol. They originated on Japanese mobile phones in 1999, and became popular in the West in the 2000s, especially after emoji were encoded in Unicode Standard version 6.0 in October 2010. In the 2010s, including emoji in the virtual keyboards of smartphones became standard; the exact representation of each emoji varies according to the character sets of each brand of mobile operating system. The Unicode additions were in response to requests by teams at both Google (which submitted a draft for consideration in 2007) and Apple, and were discussed by members of the Unicode Consortium for several years.

Unicode is a computer industry standard for encoding and representing the symbols used in writing systems, including the alphabets and number sets of 161 scripts as well as non-alphanumeric symbols. The use of Unicode ensures that text created in one computing environment will retain fidelity when viewed in another computing environment, whether that means a word processing document created on one computer and opened on another, or a text message transmitted from an Apple iPhone to an Android phone. Different operating systems and software packages may represent Unicode symbols differently, without losing meaning. For example, different platforms arrange the toppings of the hamburger emoji in different order: Apple's order is bun-lettuce-tomato-cheese-patty, while Microsoft's order is lettuce-tomato-cheese-bun. As an analogy, consider that the letter "a" is drawn differently in different fonts, but is always recognizable as the letter "a." Unlike the symbols for modern and historical scripts, there is no specific block set aside for emoji in the Unicode Standard, which instead are encoded in seven different blocks as well as a data file for handling the legacy characters of Japanese vendors. The number of emoji was increased in each subsequent Unicode Standard version; in 2023, the Unicode Standard included 3,782 emoji characters and sequences.

The word emoji is both singular and plural, though many style guides also accept "emojis" as a plural. Although emoji were preceded by emoticons (combinations of keyboard characters to suggest facial expressions), the similarity between the two words is coincidental. "Emoticon" is from English "emote" and "icon"; whereas, emoji is a Japanese word for pictograph, formed from e, "picture," and moji, "character."

Originally introduced on mobile phones, emoji spread to other telecommunications uses and pop culture in general, having been added to dictionaries, chosen as the Word of the Year, and inspiring a feature film. Some vendors offer emoji above and beyond those included in the Unicode Standard. For example, Samsung's emoji set includes chess pieces, additional traffic signs, and astronomical symbols as part of the Miscellaneous Symbols block, while Microsoft and Samsung both offer three extra variations of the pointing finger emoji, so that it can be chosen pointing in any of the cardinal directions.

Since 2013, the Emojipedia website has listed the emoji included in the Unicode Standard, along with their meanings and the way they are rendered by the most common vendors.

Further Insights

Long before emoji were developed, emoticons were used to represent facial expressions (and occasionally other things) in text-based communications, for the purpose of conveying mood. Emoticons have even earlier antecedents in Morse code abbreviations, such as "u" for "you" and "sft" for "stop for tea," that were used to reduce the cost of telegraph messages, and conventions like signing letters with "XOXO" for "hugs and kisses." Even in the nineteenth century, a high point in creative typography, typographic symbols were used to suggest the shapes and expressions of faces, albeit not on a regular basis.

"Smiley faces" were first used in the 1970s, often using overprinting. The emoticons that became standard in Western online communication—the key combinations :-) and :-( for a smiling or frowning face, respectively—were introduced by Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Scott Fahlman in 1982. Fahlman's creation established the basic mode of emoticons that would remain in use for decades. Unlike the smiley faces made with overprinting, these character combinations could be displayed directly on a computer screen. As Usenet and other online forums became more populous in the 1980s and 1990s, emoticons became a common way to disambiguate online communication, preventing jokes from being taken literally, and making it clear when an apparently critical statement was meant to be merely teasing (Filik et al., 2016). Numerous variations of emoticons were used around the world, predating the widespread use of abbreviations like LOL or IMO. While emoticons remain in use, on many platforms an autocorrect function will translate the commonly recognized ones into emoji.

The first emoji was created in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita, while working on the I-mode mobile Internet service for NTT DoCoMo. I-mode introduced a 176-character set of 12x12 pixel emoji, inspired by the use of simple symbols used in contexts like manga (where they often marked emotion in dialogue) and weather forecasts (where pictures of clouds, lightning, snowflakes, rain, and so on serve as a simple indicator of upcoming weather). This first emoji set included a variety of facial expressions, as well as symbols inspired by what Kurita saw in the city.

Native support for emoji was added to mobile operating systems at varying times in the 2010s; while a Unicode Standard version might have been released in a given month, it is not always immediately adopted by every operating system, which might continue using the old version until the next version update. Apple was a relatively early adopter of emoji, adding the emoji keyboard in the Japanese release of iOS 2.2 in 2008, though it was not added worldwide until iOS 5.0 in 2011. Apple added emoji to their desktop operating system, OS X, that same year, with 10.7 Lion. Between iOS 2.2 and 5.0, emoji could be accessed outside of Japan through third-party apps, and several messenger programs began to use them. Android, the second largest mobile platform in the United States, added native emoji support in 2013.

When Unicode Standard version 14.0 was released in 2021, it added five symbol modifiers that change the skin color of the various human emoji (102 were included with Unicode 10.0). The skin color modifiers were added in response to complaints about rendering choices that depicted all people as white. The modifiers are based on the Fitzpatrick scale developed in 1975, which classifies skin color according to its response to sunlight (how readily it burns or tans), which is a classification independent of the cultural construct of race. Human emoji not paired with a modifier are, according to the Unicode Standard, rendered in a non-realistic skin color—usually bright yellow in the United States, but sometimes grey or blue in other parts of the world. The Unicode Standard version 15.1 was released in 2022 and added 118 new emoji characters, bringing the total number of emoji characters and sequences to 3,782.

In 2017, Apple added "Animoji" to the iPhone X version of the Messages app. Animoji combine standard emoji with facial motion capture to create custom animated emoji based on the user's facial expressions.

It is even possible to register a domain name with emoji in it, by converting the emoji into Punycode, a Unicode representation used for Internet host names. Only eight top-level domains—.cf, .fm, .ga, .gq, .ml, .tk, .to, and .ws—permit this, and very few domain name registrars support it, though the first emoji domains were created in 2001. Not all browsers are compatible with emoji domains, though this may change with future software releases.

Unicode Standard version 16.0 released in 2024, added a small set of new emoji characters and sequences, continuing the trend of modest annual expansions. Unicode 16.0 included additional gendered family combinations, more directional versions of existing emoji, and refinements to existing emoji data but did not introduce an entirely new class of symbols.

Issues

Numbers and letters have specific, clear meanings: There is no ambiguity, unless context itself is unclear, about what the number 4 refers to, or how it is pronounced. Emoji are both specific and ambiguous. Some may be used as tone markers, others employed to signify the thing they depict (Q: "What do you want for dinner?" A: *pizza emoji*), or to signify some separate meaning related to the depiction.

Notably, 2015 was a banner year for emoji, the year when many indicators show that they had crossed into prominent mainstream awareness. Production began on The Emoji Movie (2017), a big-budget animated feature in the spirit of Toy Story or The Lego Movie in which the characters are emoji. The second annual World Emoji Day, an unofficial celebration, was the top trending topic on Twitter that day, on July 17. The Oxford Dictionaries chose the "Face With Tears of Joy" emoji, which had been the second-most used emoji on Twitter the previous year and the most used emoji across all platforms, as its Word of the Year, the first time that a pictograph was chosen for the honor. Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year recognizes the special importance or relevance to public conversation of a particular word, or in this case emoji. One analysis had found that 20 percent of all emoji use in the United Kingdom, and 17 percent in the United States, were the Face With Tears of Joy emoji. The word "emoji" itself had tripled in online usage in 2015 over the previous year.

The American Dialect Society declined to name an emoji their Word of the Year (picking singular "they" instead, recognizing the growing use of "they" as the gender-neutral pronoun native to English), but did single out the eggplant emoji for recognition as the Emoji of the Year. While not among the top-used emoji like Face With Tears of Joy, the eggplant is one of the best known emoji whose usage is rarely literal. Because of its shape, the eggplant emoji is often used as sexual innuendo, whether in direct reference to male genitalia or simply to suggest, more generally, sexual content. Similarly, the peach emoji is frequently used euphemistically for the buttocks. Attempts to change the rendering of the eggplant or peach emoji to make them less suggestive of these uses have been met with backlash; in particular, Apple abandoned 2016 plans to alter its peach emoji when beta testers complained. The photo-sharing social media app Instagram disabled the ability to search for either the eggplant emoji or #eggplant in 2015, in response to the use of the symbol to indicate photos of penises.

This nonliteral but commonly understood reading of the eggplant emoji speaks to one of the important communications issues in emoji use. Many of the emoji that originated in Japan have culturally specific connotations, like the shoshinsha mark that indicates a beginning driver, or the white flower that is used to indicate "excellent job on homework" (in much the same way a gold star is used in the United States). Culturally specific meanings are commonplace in symbols—such as the way a green light meaning go or a red light meaning stop can in the United States be understood in ways that do not literally refer to traffic directions, or the way the numeral "2" or the letter "U" can be read as "to" and "you" (such as in a Prince song) in English, but would not serve as similar shorthand in many other languages. The different connotations and idiomatic usages that attach to emoji according to culture or region constitute, in a sense, emoji dialects.

Recent Unicode proposal debates have highlighted the cultural and political dimension of emoji. In 2024, the Unicode Consortium declined proposals for several new emoji, including an emoji representing artificial intelligence and an emoji representing specific religious or ethnic symbols, noting that such additions risked crossing into ideological territory. These debates reflect how emoji proposals increasingly intersect with questions of representation and cultural identity.

In 2024, Google introduced a more unified emoji design system in Android 15, reducing cross-platform rendering differences. Apple also briefly tested altered visual designs for several emoji in a developer beta, including pistol emoji, though these changes were ultimately not released. These cases illustrate how vendor decisions continue to influence interpretation and public reaction.

As with any other change in language use, the use of emoji has attracted criticism and hand-wringing. There is no evidence that using emoji contributes to young people (or anyone else) being less literate or less fluent in what hand-wringers might call "real language," any more than there was that using a typewriter worsened one's writing ability or reading books worsened one's memory. Emoji in many cases function as discourse markers, a role that can also be occupied by particles like "you know" or "I mean," or discourse connectives like "but" or "because."

Discourse markers help to indicate the speaker's attitude toward what is being said, in a number of ways—while discourse connectives indicate the relationships between ideas. When emoji are used as discourse markers, they help to make up for the lack of tone of voice or body language in online communications. Like the emoticon before them, emoji can help indicate when someone is joking, when they are being sarcastic, and so forth. This type of communication is part of a larger class called paralanguage or paralinguistic cues—actions that have a value in communication and help to convey meaning, but which function differently from words. Tone of voice is paralanguage, as are body language (rolling eyes, shrugging, nodding) or deliberate pauses in speech. Emoji cannot necessarily be mapped on a one-to-one basis to specific instances of body language or tones of voice; it is not that they literally translate to those more familiar paralinguistic cues, but that, collectively, they serve the same function (Kiatkulpiboone & Paris, 2018). There is a long history of such paralanguage in print—this is the purpose, after all, of punctuation, which has been used for centuries longer than there have been rules of grammar to dictate it. The use of bold, italicized, or capitalized words is another familiar example of text-based paralanguage.

Since 2023, the increased use of AI-generated messaging tools has further expanded emoji use. Many AI systems incorporate emoji as tone markers, often mirroring human conversational patterns. This has contributed to more standardized emoji usage in informal digital communication.

By 2024, several major messaging and social platforms reported that emoji reactions—such as thumbs-up, heart, or laugh—were used more frequently than typed responses. This shift indicates that emoji have increasingly taken on the role of minimal feedback signals. functioning similarly to nodding or brief interjections in spoken communication.

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