Emoji, I Get You Now
Like Arya Stark, emoji have many faces. From Thinking Face to the infamous Pile of Poo (these are both official names), there are now over 3,600 in the emoji Unicode Standard. They change slightly between platforms, but the meaning is always the same.
Emoji are such a norm now that it’s sometimes strange to think we messaged without them! I found them cringe-worthy for the longest time, but now they’re almost a natural form of communication. How did this happen, and where did emoji spring from? I recently did a deep dive into the history of these symbols and would love to share what I’ve learned.
Their history is older than I thought! The first use of typed symbols happened in 1881. A magazine printed characters resembling a face communicating joy, melancholy, indifference, and astonishment. The evolution continued with Shigetaka Kurita, who worked for a Japanese phone company as an engineer in 1998. The company was working on an internet platform that allowed for a limited number of characters, and Kurita wanted to find a way for customers to share longer messages with less data. He named them emoji, which means pictograph in Japanese, coming from ‘e’ for picture and ‘moji’ for character.
The non-profit Unicode Consortium eventually created a standard for emoji in 2010, so they would operate cross-platform. This meant companies like Twitter, Google and Facebook could now style their versions and still appear on other platforms. This also increased the available count of standardized emoji to nearly a thousand and added one of our favs, the Pile of Poo.
The following year marked Apple finally including emoji on the iPhone, simultaneously taking away one of Android users’ biggest arguments for scoffing at iOS and launching emoji into the mainstream.
Not long after that, Apple also added same-sex couples. The same year the hashtag #EmojiArtHistory trended on Tumblr with people recreating famous works of art via these small images, and Matthew Rothenberg launched Emojitracker which tracks every tweet with an emoji and records them in realtime.
2013 really was a landmark year for emoji! Emojipedia launched as a guide to the Unicode standard and the true meaning behind each symbol, and the word itself was added to the Oxford dictionary. A couple of years later brought the much-needed addition of skin tones and Instagram banned the #eggplant emoji (which Instagram later removed).
The history of emoji has been pretty storied with many unexpected turns. After my research, I feel like I’ve got a better hold on where they came from the evolution and social impact they’ve had on our culture and hopefully you learned something as well! =)
