THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE EMOJI

By ARIELLE PARDES

Emoji are more than a current fad. Think of them more like a basic language. The tiny, emotive
characters—from 😜 to 🎉 to 💩—represent the first language born of the digital world, designed to
add emotion to text. Emoji have been popular since they first appeared on Japanese cell phones in the
’90s, and in the past few years they have become a huge part of the way people communicate. In 2015,
😂 became Oxford Dictionaries’ “Word” of the Year.

The First Emoji

In the beginning, there were emoticons. Emoticons are symbols like :-) and :-( that can be made out of
regular symbols on your computer. These became an important part of internet conversations in the
1990s.

The first emoji were created in 1999 by Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita. Kurita worked for a cell phone
company. He wanted to design a way to convey information in a simple, short way: for example, an icon
to show the weather forecast rather than spelling out “cloudy.” So Kurita sketched a set of basic images
that could be selected on Japanese cell phones. Kurita’s original 176 emoji—now part of the permanent
collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art—included symbols, but not faces. There were
characters to show the weather (sun, clouds, umbrella, snowman), traffic (car, tram, airplane, ship),
technology (home phone, cell phone, TV, video games), and all the phases of the moon. The emoji also
made it possible to show emotion in a message. It was the beginning of a new visual language.

First Emoji Created by Shigetaka Kurita

Emoji Became Standardized

Emoji quickly became popular in Japan, and then in other countries as well. In 2007, Google pushed to
have emoji recognized by the Unicode Consortium. The Unicode Consortium is a group that helps
symbols show up the same when they are sent across different computers. Unicode makes it so that the
letters you type in English, Chinese, Arabic, or Hebrew on one device still show up correctly when you
send them to different devices. The Google team wanted the Unicode Consortium to make this possible
for emoji characters as well.

Unicode accepted the proposal in 2010, in a move that would soon make emoji accessible everywhere.
They did this because they knew emoji had become too popular to ignore. Now that emoji could be sent
between different devices, emoji were officially on their way to becoming a language.

Emoji Continued to Grow

Beginning in 2011, companies began adding emojis to their device’s keyboards, which made them much
easier to use. As emoji became more popular, they also became more plentiful. The Unicode Consortium
kept adding new emoji to its approved list each year. Unicode requires a long submission and approval
process for every new suggested emoji. It can take up to two years for an emoji to become official once
it has been submitted as a suggestion.

Emoji Became More Diverse

As the emoji vocabulary began to grow, some people wondered why some cultures and people were
represented in emoji more than others. Why were there half a dozen icons to describe sushi, but zero
tacos, burritos, or enchiladas? There were a growing number of emoji professionals—doctors, chefs,
policemen—but why did they all appear to be men? And why, among the many different emoji
representing humans, were all of them white people?

In 2015, Unicode took its first big step toward making emoji more diverse, by introducing the option to
change the skin tone on people emoji. Since then, every update has included small steps toward
representing more people and cultures on the emoji keyboard.

The Future of Emoji

The Unicode Consortium still considers new emoji every year, which means emoji continue to evolve
with every update to iOS and Android. Recent additions included mythical creatures (mermaids, genies,
elves, and vampires), food (pie, sandwich, broccoli, takeout), animals (dinosaur, hedgehog, giraffe,
zebra), and faces (starstruck, mindblown, shhhing, and angry face). Perhaps more importantly, the
update also added half a dozen new ways to represent humans with different jobs, different religions,
different hair colors, and more.

Anyone can submit a proposal to add a new emoji. The next batch of emoji will depend on what people
design and submit for consideration to Unicode. One thing is for sure – emoji do not seem to be going
away any time soon.

Article from https://www.wired.com/story/guide-emoji/, adapted by Miss Harding.

Emoji are smileys and pictures that represent ideas that are used in electronic messages and online.
Emoji exist in various genres, including facial expressions, common objects, places and types of weather,
and animals.

Originating on Japanese cell phones in 1999, emoji became increasingly popular worldwide in the 2010s.
They are now considered to be a large part of popular culture. In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries named
the Face with Tears of Joy emoji the Word of the Year.

History

The first emoji was created in 1999 in Japan by Shigetaka Kurita. He was part of a team working for a cell
phone company. He took inspiration from weather forecasts that used symbols to show weather, as well
as from other cultures who used pictures to express meaning. Kurita created the first 180 emoji based
on the expressions that he observed people making and other things in the city.

From 2010 onwards, some emoji have been accepted into Unicode, an organization that helps emoji be
able to be transferred correctly from one phone or computer to another. New emoji continue to be
added to Unicode.

Emoji characters vary slightly between different devices, but each emoji is drawn to carry a similar
message. For example, the laughing crying emoji might look slightly different between an Apple and
Android phone, or between Facebook and Twitter, but it still means the same thing.

Journalists have noted that some emoji have come to mean different things than what they were
originally designed for. For example, the nail polish emoji is often used to imply “non-caring
fabulousness,” "shutting haters down,” or “a sense of accomplishment".

As of July 2017 there were 2,666 emoji on the official Unicode Standard list.

Cultural influence

Different Versions of FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY Emoji

Oxford Dictionaries named 😂 emoji its 2015 Word of the Year and recognized its impact on popular
culture. Emoji have also become so popular that movies and musicals are now made about emoji. In
January 2017, researchers announced that the Face With Tears of Joy was the most popular emoji. The
Heart was second and the Heart eyes emoji was third. However, people in different cultures use emoji
differently. Some are more popular in certain cultures than others.
Emoji communications problems

Research has shown that emoji are often misunderstood. In some cases, this misunderstanding is
because the receiver and sender understood the emoji in different ways. In other cases, it is because the
emoji actually looked different on the receiver’s device than it did on the sender’s.

Diversity

Recently, people noticed that some cultures and people were represented in emoji more than others.
Why were there half a dozen icons to describe sushi, but zero tacos, burritos, or enchiladas? There were
a growing number of emoji professionals—doctors, chefs, policemen—but why did they all appear to be
men? And why, among the many different emoji representing humans, were all of them white people?

In 2015, Unicode 8.0 took its first big step toward making emoji more diverse, by introducing the option
to change the skin tone on people emoji. Since then, every update has included small steps toward
representing more people and cultures on the emoji keyboard.

Differences across platforms

The exact appearance of each emoji varies between types of phones, computers, or devices. Android,
Apple, Chrome OS, Linux, and Microsoft Windows all have their own emoji “fonts.” The appearance also
varies between social media sites. Facebook and Twitter have their own “fonts” as well. Some types of
phones and computers also add their own emoji that are not a part of Unicode. However, these cannot
be seen when they are sent to other types of devices.

In popular culture

A movie was made that included emoji in 2009, a book in 2014, a musical in 2016, and TV shows in 2017.
Most famously, on July 28, 2017, Sony Pictures Animation released The Emoji Movie, a 3D computer
animated movie. Additionally, the original collection of emoji is housed in the Museum of Modern Art,
and the first emoji-themed convention, Emojicon, was held in San Franciso in 2016.

Article from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji, adapted by Miss Harding.

Emoji are cute. It’s easy to think they’re just for teenagers whose phones are permanently glued to their
hands. But there’s so much more beneath the surface — in form, function, history, and future.

A Hieroglyph for the 21st Century

There are various reasons to use emoticons or emoji, the most obvious being to add a level of
expression and emotion not achieved by the writing itself. Secondly, they are a much shorter way of
saying something, as opposed to writing it out.

Eventually, people started to use emoji and emoticons to add literal meaning, implied meaning, and
style to their communication. They carried so much meaning, they became like hieroglyphs for the 21st
century. (Hieroglyphs are an ancient Egyptian form of writing with pictures.)

The original set of emoji were designed in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita for a Japanese cell phone company.
Kurita created emoji because he wanted to create a language that goes beyond just words. This idea is
not entirely new in its conception, but the technology available to us today makes it a real possibility.

The Ancient Art of Text as Image

This picture shows how the Phoenician language created a writing symbol that looked like a real cow,
that eventually evolved into the letter A. Now we are using a picture of a cow to represent meaning once
again.

Human beings have been making marks as a means of communication for a long time, from cave walls
to real writing systems. The need to make a mark — to share an idea, information, or meaning from you
to another human who is not actually with you when you make that mark — is ancient but also
surprisingly recent. Initially, humans drew pictures, which evolved into letters that represent single
sounds. With the rise of emoji, humans seem to be moving back to this idea of text as image.

Differences

However, even though we might like to think of emoji as a new, cool kind of language, the use of emojis
is actually quite limited. They mostly function as a way to show how we feel, or they're simply used for
fun. People who are close friends or family might establish their own private code of emojis, just like
twins sometimes establish a private language between themselves, but the code does not become
popular with any one else.

The use of emojis, then, is more like certain kinds of animal communication, which generally can be used
only for very specific purposes. For example, bees are known to dance to inform the hive of the location
of a food source, but the dance cannot express any other kind of information. Birdsong indicates
location and conveys warnings and has a function in mate selection, but the songs cannot express any
other kind of information. This is not language in the human sense.

What of hieroglyphs? They are a written system that evolved over time to record the ancient Egyptian
language in physical form. One reason hieroglyphs are different than emojis are because they were
logograms and phonograms. This means that each picture represented a word, phrase, or sound that
could be combined with other symbols to make new words.

For example, the mouth-shaped symbol stood for the word "mouth," which was
pronounced "r".

The wave-shaped logogram represented the word "water" and was pronounced "n."

Thus the combination spelled "rn," the ancient Egyptian word for "name."

Each emoji, on the other hand, stands for an idea on its own. Multiple emoji cannot be put together to
represent an entirely new word or idea. And that is why emojis are not a new language, and a bit
different than hieroglyphs.

Article from https://medium.com/s/world-wide-wtf/meaning-without-words-an-emoji-revolution-

The “grinning face with smiling eyes” emoji has gotten me into some confusing messaging threads. The
person on the other end of the message is usually using an Android device, so to them, the emoji looks
like a big smile. For me, an iPhone user, it looks like a sarcastic smile or unhappy face.

Then there are new emoji that don’t exist on all platforms, where they might show up as a blank square
or question mark.

A new study shows that people can misinterpret the emotion and meaning in emoji quite a lot, even
when their emoji look exactly the same.

Why We Misunderstand

There’s no standard emoji font, and while the Unicode Consortium tries to have some similarity across
platforms, there are still big differences between emoji on phones and the internet. The tiny cartoon
renderings of people, places, and things look different when you’re on an iOS, Android, or Windows
device, on an OS like Firefox, or web service like Twitter. Therefore, the emoji you send may look
different to the person you send it to.

Research

To find out how the differences impact the way people interpret conversation, researchers conducted a
survey to see how people with different devices (and different looking emoji) understood the emoji
differently.

Researchers found that people disagreed a lot about the meaning of 40 percent of emoji.
Unlike the heart-eyes emoji, which has a pretty obvious meaning to most people, the grinning emoji had
a lot of disagreement about the meaning. People also disagreed a lot about the meaning of Apple’s
“unamused face.” People could not agree whether this emoji represented “disappointment,”
“depressing,” “unimpressed” or “suspicious.”

Other Communication We Misinterpret

Emoji have become popular ways to communicate via pictorial representations of thoughts and feelings,
but it’s not the only form of online communication that’s often misinterpreted. Sarcasm is also often
misunderstood when communicating through writing.

Additionally, one research explains, “Another angle that we think is interesting is that emoji can be
interpreted differently depending on the culture that you’re in. Emoji originated in Japan, and some of
them have transferred over, and we’ve heard stories of emoji meaning different things here than they
do in Japan. And I’m sure there are other cultures that have different interpretations.”

Future Research

The emoji study could lead to further research regarding how the tiny icons change our understanding
of conversations, including how we understand sarcasm or jokes with emoji, or if knowing someone
really well helps us understand their emoji better.

Article from https://www.dailydot.com/debug/emoji-miscommunicate/, adapted by Miss Harding.

The first emoji were created in 1999 by Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita. Kurita worked for a cell phone
company. He wanted to design a way to convey information in a simple, short way: for example, an icon
to show the weather forecast rather than spelling out “cloudy.”

So Kurita sketched a set of basic images that could be selected on Japanese cell phones. Kurita’s original
176 emoji—now part of the permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art—included
symbols, but not faces. There were characters to show the weather (sun, clouds, umbrella, snowman),
traffic (car, tram, airplane, ship), technology (home phone, cell phone, TV, video games), and all the
phases of the moon. The emoji also made it possible to show emotion in a message. It was the beginning
of a new visual language.

Limitations

However, there was a problem. At this time, only cell phones made by this one Japanese phone
company were able to send the emoji between each other. Other phones and devices did not yet have
the technology programmed in them to show emoji.

When other Japanese phone companies and phone companies in other countries did soon develop this
technology for their own cell phones, it still did not solve the problem. The technology for “reading” an
emoji in one company’s phones was different from the technology for “reading” an emoji in another
company’s phones. Therefore, the phones were unable to read, make sense of, and display each other’s
emoji.

Emoji not recognized

The Unicode Consortium

To solve that problem, in 2007, Google pushed to have emoji recognized by the Unicode Consortium.
The Unicode Consortium is a group that takes every letter, number, symbol and punctuation mark that it
deems worthy and assigns each a specific number that a computer will recognize. This makes it so that
all symbols will show up the same when they are sent across different computers. For example, an
exclamation point sent from one phone will show up as an exclamation point on the receiving phone.

The Google team asked the Unicode Consortium to make this possible for emoji characters as well.
Unicode accepted the proposal in 2010, in a move that would soon make emoji accessible everywhere.
They did this because they knew emoji had become too popular to ignore. Now that emoji could be sent
between different devices, emoji were able to grow much more popular.

The Unicode Consortium is still the organization that makes all of our current emoji compatible when
they are sent from an Apple to an Android phone, or when text copied from Facebook is input into
Twitter. New emoji must be made official by the Unicode Consortium, before we are able to send them
between different platforms and devices. Thus, it basically has the power to create new emojis.

A new batch of emoji is currently under review, a process that takes months. In an interview last week,
Mr. Davis, the 63-year-old co-founder and president of the Unicode Consortium, discussed the latest
group of 67 images, set for a vote at the consortium’s meeting next spring. The pictures include a groom
in a tuxedo (there is already a bride), a Mother Christmas figure (a counterpart to the existing Santa
Claus), a pregnant woman, a drooling face, a clown, a shark, an avocado and two strips of bacon.

After the vote in May, a final version including approved new emojis will come out in June. But that does
not mean people will immediately be able to send texts depicting sharks, bacon and Mother Christmas.

“These don’t magically appear once we approve them,” Mr. Davis. said. “Manufacturers have to put
them on their phones. But once they are approved in the May meeting, then vendors will typically go
ahead and start working on them.”

His eagerness to use one symbol suggested that he was confident that at least that one is guaranteed to
win approval from vendors.

“I’ll tell you what I think I’m going to use the most often once it’s available,” he said. “The rolling eyes
emoji.”

Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/21/technology/how-emojis-find-their-way-to-