The History of The Emoji

By: Emma Faillace

Emojis πŸ§˜πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ 🌍 🌦️ 🍞 πŸš— πŸ“ž πŸŽ‰ ❀️

Emojis are small digital icons or images used to express emotions or an idea. The word emoji originated from the two Japanese words β€œe”, meaning picture and β€œmoji” meaning character.

History:

The concept of emojis is not entirely new considering multiple cultures have used pictograms as an expression of emotions for centuries. For example, the Egyptians have used hieroglyphics to record their stories and history.

Evolution of Emojis:

Wingdings, a font invented by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes, was first used by Microsoft in 1990. It could be used to send pictographs in text messages, but would only load on devices with the Wingdings font installed

Wingdings Icons

The modern day emoji can be traced back to chat rooms in the 1990’s, starting from :) to represent a smile or ;) to represent a wink.

Designer Shigetaka Kurita is considered to be the founder of todays emojis. In 1999, NTT DOCOMO, a Japanese cell phone company, released a set of 176 emojis for mobile phones. Kurita used Japanese graphic novels and Zapf Dingbats typeface as well as illustrations and pictograms to create the first emoji library. The pixelated designs that ultimately gave way to today’s expansive emoji database are on display at the Museum of Modern Art.

2008-2014 Unicode Emoji

Unicode, formally the Unicode Standard, is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems.

Example: U+1F469 πŸ‘© WOMAN

Mobile providers in both the United States and Europe began discussions on how to introduce their own emoji sets from 2004 onwards. Many companies did not begin to take emoji seriously until Google employees requested that Unicode look into the possibility of a uniform emoji set. Apple quickly followed and began to collaborate with not only Google, but also providers in Europe and Japan. In August 2007, Mark Davis wrote the first draft for consideration by the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) to introduce emoji into the Unicode standard.

2015-Present

June 2015, the first approved version "Emoji 1.0" of the Unicode Emoji report was published as Unicode Technical Report #51 (UTR #51). This introduced the mechanism of skin tone indicators, the first official recommendations about which Unicode characters were to be considered emoji, and the first official recommendations about which characters were to be displayed in an emoji font.

In 2015, and for the first time ever, Oxford dictionary deemed an emoji its β€œWord of the Year.” The β€œFace with Tears of Joy” πŸ˜‚ emoji earned the title because it was the most frequently used emoji worldwide.

Today, more than 3,000 emojis exist.

Top 10 Emoji:

While new emojis are rolled out every year, some are classics. These are the Top 10 emojis sent on IOS, according to Emojipedia.org.

  • πŸ˜‚

  • ❀️

  • 😭

  • 😍

  • 😘

  • πŸ™„

  • πŸ’€

  • 😊

  • 😩

  • πŸ€”


Reference:

http://www.refinery29.com/instagram-story-tips#slide-7

https://www.hackreactor.com/blog/the-invention-of-emojis-a-brief-history

Emojipedia.org

https://www.history.co.uk/articles/the-history-of-emojis

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