Emoji

• 1. Introduction

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  In 2024, a set of tiny pictures that had gone unrecognised came to light on an old portable device. The Sharp PA-8500, dating from 1988, holds what can be defined as the earliest known emoji set that reflects emoji keyboards today. That find pushes the emoji back more than a decade before the date long credited. An emoji is a small picture dropped into a text message or web page, and its birth is far messier than its tidy reputation suggests. Who built the first sets? How did a feature from Japanese phones end up governed by an international standards committee? And why can one small face read as warmth to one person and contempt to another?

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• 2. Before the Pictures

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  In 1982, computer scientist Scott Fahlman suggested that the text symbols :-) and :-( could replace words. His idea had an older echo. In the 1960s, the novelist and professor Vladimir Nabokov told The New York Times that there should exist "a special typographical sign for a smile". Fahlman's emoticons stood out because they used ordinary alphabet symbols and aimed to carry emotion in place of language. For that reason they are seen as the true origin of the emoticon. It took until the 1990s for Japanese, American and European companies to turn the concept into something mainstream.

  Bruce Parello, a student at the University of Illinois, built similar symbols into PLATO IV in 1972. Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope point this out. PLATO IV was the first e-learning system. It never reached the mainstream, so only a small number of people ever saw Parello's pictograms.

  The IBM PC shipped two simple smiling faces in its Code page 437 character set as early as 1981. Microsoft's Wingdings, released in 1990, could carry pictographs inside rich text messages, but only on devices that had the font installed. In 1995, the French newspaper Le Monde announced a new phone from Alcatel, the BC 600. Its welcome screen showed a digital smiley face where other devices displayed a line of text. That face arrived two years before J-Phone put a full set of tiny pictures on a handset.

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• 3. Japan's Tiny Pictures

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  The word emoji joins the Japanese e and moji, and it originally meant pictograph. Its resemblance to the English words emotion and emoticon is purely coincidental.

  The J-Phone SkyWalker DP-211SW, launched by SoftBank's J-Phone arm in 1997, carried 90 emoji. Each was 12 by 12 pixels and monochrome. They depicted numbers, sports, the time, moon phases and the weather, and they included the Pile of Poo. The phone sold poorly, so the set was rarely used. It stayed obscure until an Emojipedia blog article in 2019 brought it back to light. The 2024 finds also included a set from NEC, dating to the early 1990s.

  In 1999, Shigetaka Kurita created the better-known set for NTT DoCoMo's i-mode mobile platform. DoCoMo wanted pictures to ease electronic communication and to set its service apart from rivals. According to interviews, Kurita drew on the conventions of Japanese manga, Chinese characters, street signs and weather pictograms. His 176 emoji were brightly colored, though each used a single color. The faces borrowed a style common in manga and anime and mixed it with kaomoji and smiley elements. Sports, actions and weather symbols trace back to his work. The yellow-faced emoji used today do not, because they evolved from other emoticon sets. In October 2016, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City acquired the original DoCoMo collection.

  Nokia phones in the 1990s shipped preset pictograms in their text messaging app, which the company called "smileys and symbols". A third notable set came from au by KDDI. Emoji grew popular across platforms in Japan over the following decade, yet the competitors never agreed on a uniform set. Their encodings clashed. The extended Shift JIS code F797 meant a convenience store on SoftBank but a wristwatch on KDDI. All three carriers also placed their emoji in the Unicode Private Use Area. DoCoMo's range ran from U+E63E through U+E757, often incompatible with its rivals' schemes.

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• 4. The Smiley Rush

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  In 1999, Nicolas Loufrani applied to the US Copyright Office to register 471 smileys he had created. Soon afterwards he launched The Smiley Dictionary, which hosted the largest collection of smileys at the time and sorted them into categories. Loufrani headed The Smiley Company. The desktop platform let people insert smileys as text when writing emails. By 2003 it had grown to 887 smileys and 640 ascii emotions.

  A smiley toolbar on smileydictionary.com carried the symbols into forums and instant messaging. Within about two years, The Smiley Dictionary became the plug-in of choice. It had competitors, but it was the most popular.

  From 2001, MSN Messenger allowed customisation, and many users imported emoticons to use as text in their messages. Nokia, then one of the largest telecom companies, was still calling today's emoji sets smileys that year. MSN Messenger and BlackBerry eventually noticed how popular the unofficial sets had become. They launched their own from late 2003 onwards. Standards bodies, meanwhile, were still declining to look at any of it.

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• 5. Winning Over Unicode

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  Since 1993, the Universal Coded Character Set, known as Unicode, had been the international standard for text, catalogued as ISO/IEC 10646. It already held characters later classed as emoji. They came from sources such as DOS code page 437, ITC Zapf Dingbats and the WordPerfect Iconic Symbols set. Unicode 4.0 added 16 more, including direction arrows, a warning triangle and an eject button. The Japanese cellular sets were judged out of scope.

  In August 2007, a Google team of Mark Davis, Kat Momoi and Markus Scherer began petitioning the Unicode Technical Committee to standardise emoji. The committee had earlier ruled emoji out of scope. It now broadened its remit to stay compatible with the Japanese carrier formats, which were spreading. Peter Edberg and Yasuo Kida of Apple joined the effort soon after. Their official proposal arrived in January 2009 with 625 new emoji characters, and Unicode accepted it in 2010.

  Until real code points existed, Google and Apple relied on Private Use Area schemes. Google introduced emoji in Gmail in October 2008, working with au by KDDI. Apple released the first Apple Color Emoji to iPhone OS on the 21st of November 2008. At first it worked only for holders of a SoftBank SIM card, and the designs mostly resembled SoftBank's.

  Apple had meant the emoji keyboard to stay in Japan under iOS version 2.2. Then iPhone users in the United States discovered that downloading Japanese apps unlocked it, and pressure grew. In February 2010, Josh Gare created an Emoji application for iOS that altered the Settings app to open the keyboard. Apple finally made the keyboard available outside Japan in iOS version 5.0 in 2011.

  Throughout 2009, members of the Unicode Consortium and national standards bodies in the United States, Europe and Japan gave feedback. They agreed on a set of 722 emoji, released in October 2010 as Unicode 6.0. Merging sources took care. The shower weather symbol from the ARIB broadcasting set was unified with an existing umbrella with raindrops character. The Rain emoji from all three Japanese carriers were folded into it. In June 2014, Unicode 7.0 added the Webdings and Wingdings repertoires, which brought approximately 250 more emoji. The 1990 font that once loaded only where installed finally had its pictographs inside the standard.

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• 6. Inside the Standard

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  In late 2014, the Unicode Technical Committee opened a Public Review Issue on a proposed report titled Unicode Emoji. It was meant to improve interoperability between vendors and to define a way to support multiple skin tones. Feedback closed in January 2015. In June 2015, the first approved version, Emoji 1.0, was published as Unicode Technical Report 51. It introduced skin tone indicators and the first official recommendations about which characters count as emoji. A Unicode Emoji Subcommittee took charge of maintaining it and taking requests. In May 2017 it became an independent specification, Unicode Technical Standard 51, and 2,666 Unicode emoji were listed that year. The May 2018 edition jumped to Emoji 11.0 to match the major version of Unicode itself.

  Unicode 8.0, also from June 2015, added another 41 emoji. They included the cricket bat, the taco, new facial expressions and symbols for places of worship. Five characters, the crab, scorpion, lion face, bow and arrow and amphora, improved pictorial support for the signs of the Zodiac.

  Five skin tone modifiers, U+1F3FB through U+1F3FF, also arrived with Unicode 8.0. They are based on the Fitzpatrick scale for classifying human skin color. A human emoji with no modifier should show a generic, non-realistic tone such as bright yellow, blue or gray. The modifiers work with 133 human emoji, and non-human emoji ignore them.

  A zero-width joiner placed between emoji can make them behave as one character. A man, a woman and a girl can display as a single family. Systems that lack support simply show the three base emoji in a row. Unicode once catalogued every joined sequence that worked on at least one common platform. It now documents sequences recommended for general interchange, which fonts are expected to include. In 2016, Microsoft used the same mechanism to build Ninja Cat for the Windows 10 Anniversary Update. Ninja Cat and its variants were removed in late 2021's Fluent emoji redesign.

  Presentation is a third dial. Following a base character with U+FE0E asks for the black-and-white text style, and U+FE0F asks for the colorful emoji style. As of 2025, Unicode defines presentation sequences for 371 characters. The Unicode Technical Committee has since judged that unifying colorful emoji with textual symbols and dingbats was a "mistake". It now allocates new code points instead. Unicode specifies 3,953 emoji using 1,438 characters across 24 blocks. Of those characters, 26 are regional indicator symbols that pair up to form flags, and 12 are base characters for keycap sequences.

  Corporate demand pressed hard on the Consortium. Some members complained that emoji had overtaken its traditional work on minority languages and historical records. The Consortium saw a benefit. Most emoji live in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane. It is shared with scripts such as Adlam and Osage. Some older systems handled only the Basic Multilingual Plane. Demand for emoji pushed vendors to upgrade, which also improved support for historic and minority scripts. In 2022, the Consortium stopped accepting flag proposals, saying new flags "creates exclusivity at the expense of others". New flags still arrive when a country joins ISO 3166-1, with no proposal needed.

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• 7. Misread and Disputed

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  In April 2020, British actress and presenter Jameela Jamil tweeted from her iPhone. Her comment about people shopping for food during the COVID-19 pandemic used an emoji. On Apple's iOS the face looked neutral and pensive. On other platforms it showed as a giggling face. Some fans concluded she was mocking poor people, which was not what she meant.

  Behind her mishap sits a technical fact. Emoji travel as encoded data rather than as pictures. A reader's device may draw the same character differently when the software differs. Apple's calendar emoji always shows July 17, the date in 2002 when Apple announced its iCal calendar application for macOS. That led some Apple users to nickname July 17 World Emoji Day. Other emoji fonts show different dates or none. Some Apple designs also stay close to SoftBank's, since SoftBank was the first Japanese network to carry the iPhone.

  Culture adds a second layer. In China, people have developed a subversive use of a smiley face to convey a despising, mocking attitude. The muscle near the upper eye corner on the emoji does not move. The muscle near the mouth tightens, which is believed to signal a suppressed smile. Journalists have noted that this ambiguity lets emoji pick up culture-specific meanings. One has been described in English-language communities as signifying "non-caring fabulousness". Unicode manuals sometimes add notes on auxiliary meanings. One seat symbol, for example, may be expected to mean "a reserved or ticketed seat, as for an airplane, train, or theater". Researchers from the German Studies Institute at Ruhr-Universität Bochum found that people easily understand an emoji that directly replaces a word. An icon for a rose is one example. Even so, it took about 50 percent longer to comprehend the emoji.

  Multiple arrests and imprisonments have followed the use of pistol, knife and bomb emoji in ways authorities deemed credible threats. Ahead of the 2016 Summer Olympics, the Unicode Consortium considered Olympic proposals, including medals and events such as handball and water polo. By October 2015, the candidates included "rifle" and "modern pentathlon". In 2016, Apple and Microsoft opposed those two. They were added without emoji presentations, so software is expected to render them in black and white, and onscreen keyboards generally leave them out. Early pentathlon art showed all five events, including a man pointing a gun. The final character shows a person riding a horse, with a laser pistol target in the corner.

  On the 1st of August 2016, Apple announced that iOS 10 would change the pistol emoji from a realistic revolver to a water pistol. The following day, Microsoft pushed a Windows 10 update that turned its longstanding toy raygun into a real revolver. Microsoft said the change brought the glyph in line with industry-standard designs and customer expectations. By 2018, most major platforms, including Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Facebook and Twitter, had adopted Apple's water gun. The editor of Emojipedia criticised the change because messages could appear differently to the receiver than the sender intended. Insider Rob Price warned of "serious miscommunication across different platforms". He asked, "What if a joke sent from an Apple user to a Google user is misconstrued because of differences in rendering?"

  Beginning in December 2014, the hashtag EggplantFridays rose on Instagram. People used it to mark photos of clothed or unclothed penises, because the eggplant emoji stood in for one. From April 2015, Instagram disabled search for that tag and other eggplant hashtags, including the emoji itself. A 2016 Emojipedia analysis found that only seven percent of English-language tweets with the peach emoji referred to the fruit. Apple tried in 2016 to redesign it to look less like buttocks. Beta testers reacted with fierce backlash, and Apple reversed the decision before the public release. In December 2017, a lawyer in Delhi, India, threatened to sue WhatsApp over the middle finger emoji. He argued that the company was "directly abetting the use of an offensive, lewd, obscene gesture" in violation of the Indian Penal Code.

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• 8. Culture and Language

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  In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries named emoji its Word of the Year, noting a sizable increase in use of the word. Oxford Dictionaries President Caspar Grathwohl said that "traditional alphabet scripts have been struggling to meet the rapid-fire, visually focused demands of 21st Century communication." SwiftKey found that Face with Tears of Joy was the most popular emoji across the world.

  In January 2017, researchers at the University of Michigan analyzed more than 1.2 billion messages entered through the Kika Emoji Keyboard. It is believed to be the first large-scale study of emoji usage. The French used heart emoji the most. People in Australia, France and the Czech Republic used more happy emoji, while people in Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Argentina used more negative ones.

  Mark Davis, founder of the Unicode Consortium, compared emoji use to a developing language. Some linguists classify emoji and emoticons as discourse markers. Emoji tend to have no meaning of their own and act as a paralanguage, setting emotional tone and adding clarity and credibility to text. They appear more often in positive communication. Women use emoji more than men, while men use a wider variety. Women are also more likely to use them in public than in private. Extraversion and agreeableness are positively correlated with emoji use, and neuroticism is negatively correlated.

  Studies using Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory found that cultures with high power distance and tolerance for indulgence used more negative emoji. Cultures with high uncertainty avoidance, individualism and long-term orientation used more positive ones. A six-country user experience study suggested that smiley scales may ease translation in brief cross-cultural surveys. Some emoji are specific to Japanese culture. Examples include the shoshinsha mark for a beginner driver, a white flower for "brilliant homework", and foods like ramen noodles, dango, onigiri, curry and sushi.

  Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne found that the most common emoji bigrams, trigrams and quadrigrams repeat the same emoji. In English, repeating a word back to back is rare. For emoji, repetition adds emphasis. One crying laughing emoji means something is funny, two mean it is really funny, and three might mean incredibly funny. Snapchat built emoji into its trophy and friends system. So-called fairy comments place heart, star and fairy emoji between the words of a sentence. They often invert the usual meaning of hearts and may "tread on borders of offense." Legal experts have also discussed whether emoji could be admissible as evidence in court.

  Machines have started to read emoji too. In December 2015, a sentiment analysis of emoji was published, and the Emoji Sentiment Ranking 1.0 was provided. In 2017, the MIT Media Lab published DeepMoji, a deep neural network trained on 1.2 billion emoji occurrences in Twitter data from 2013 to 2017. It outperformed human subjects at identifying sarcasm in tweets. In 2021, the text-to-speech website 15.ai used its emoji embeddings so users could set the emotion of synthesized speech with guiding phrases.

  Some emoji were added to serve causes. A mosquito emoji arrived in 2018 to raise awareness of diseases the insect spreads, such as dengue and malaria. On the 5th of March 2019, a drop of blood emoji was released to help break the stigma of menstruation. It also covers medical topics such as donating blood.

  Screens and stages picked emoji up as well. The 2009 film Moon featured a robot named GERTY, which communicates through a neutral synthesized voice and a screen of emoji. In 2014, the Library of Congress acquired an emoji version of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, created by Fred Benenson. A musical called Emojiland premiered at Rockwell Table & Stage in Los Angeles in May 2016, after selected songs were presented there in 2015. In November 2016, San Francisco hosted Emojicon, the first emoji-themed convention. In March 2017, the first episode of Samurai Jack's fifth season featured aliens who communicate in emoji. A month later, the Doctor Who episode "Smile" featured nanobots called Vardy, which use emoji and are sometimes called "Emojibots". On the 28th of July 2017, Sony Pictures Animation released The Emoji Movie. Voices included Patrick Stewart, Christina Aguilera, Sofía Vergara, Anna Faris and T. J. Miller. Critics panned it, and it is considered one of the worst animated films. On the 3rd of September 2021, Drake released his sixth studio album, Certified Lover Boy. Its cover art features twelve emoji of pregnant women, varied in clothing colors, hair colors and skin tones.

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