July 17 recognizes World Emoji Day and many of the world’s symbolic icons for digital calendars.
Now before the emoji, there were emoticons. Emoticons (emotion + icon) were developed as an expression of emotions in the cold hard texts that were devoid of them.
Emoji, a Japanese expression, roughly means “picture word” and was developed in 1990 by Shigetaka Kurita. While working for NTT Docomo, a Japanese telecom company, Kurita design these picture words as a feature on their pagers to make them more appealing to teens.
When Apple released the first iPhone in 2007, an emoji keyboard was embedded to nab the Japanese market. While not intended for U.S. users to find, they did and quickly figured out how to use it.
Every year new emojis (both emoji and emojis are acceptable plural forms of the word) are developed. The emojipedia.org keeps track of all the emoji updates across all platforms and operating systems. There are over 1800 emojis covering much more than just emotions. From transportation, food, an assortment of wild and domesticated animals to social platforms, weather, and bodily functions emojis virtually speak for themselves.
In 2014, Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge created World Emoji Day. The date of July 17 has been intrinsic to the iconic red and black Apple calendar emoji since its launch in 2002.
- In 1999, the Japanese designer Shigetaka Kurita created the first collection of cell phone emoji for the debut of “the world’s first major mobile internet system,” called NTT Docomo’s i-mode. The program they were working with “limited users to up to 250 characters in an email,” according to Kurita, “so we thought emoji would be a quick and easy way for them to communicate. Plus using only words in such a short message could lead to misunderstandings … It’s difficult to express yourself properly in so few characters.” He used a variety of everyday symbols, Chinese characters, street signs, and manga imagery for inspiration, and eventually came up with 176 12-pixel by 12-pixel characters—a much-simplified version of the images we now text on a regular basis.
- There was a lot of debate about the addition of a hot dog. Digital Trends reported on the dispute in 2014, when some users were so incensed over the lack of a hot dog emoji that they even petitioned the White House to make it happen. As it turns out, there is a very good reason that the character wasn’t initially created. Finally, in 2015 a mustard hot dog emoji was added.
- The most popular emoji isn’t the slice of pizza—or the thumbs up. The most popular emoji vary from country to country. In July 2016, Metro reported that Twitter ran some analytics and says the “despairing crying face” is the most-used in the United States, Canada, and the U.K. Another popular choice is the musical notes, which is a top pick in Colombia, Brazil, and Argentina. Additionally, Twitter users tend to favor the beer emoji over the steaming cup of coffee, and that the full heart is tweeted more frequently than the broken heart. When it comes to food, the birthday cake is most-used, followed by the classic slice of pizza, and the strawberry rounds out the top three.
- The Museum of Modern Art owns the original 1999 emoji collection.
- The emoji craze had caught on so much throughout 2012 and 2013 that it was added as a real word by the one and only Oxford Dictionaries in August 2013, along with several other strange new words that could only be explained by the internet.
- There 2,666 emojis in the Unicode Standard list as of July 2017.
- 60 billion emojis are sent on Facebook every day as of July 2017.
- Emoji usage in marketing messages has increased at an annual growth rate of over 775 percent as of 2016.
- In a ranking of the world’s top 10 used emojis on Facebook, the laughing with tears emoji, the heart eyes emoji, and the kissy face emoji were top three as of July 2017.
- New emojis are being added all the time. In 2017 the Unicode Consortium finalized 69 new ones including a vampire, a genie, a mermaid, and many more.
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