Over 10 Billion Emojis Are Sent Every Day

July 17th recognizes World Emoji Day and many of the world’s symbolic icons for digital calendars. The day encourages us to use emojis to send unique messages.

• 1862 – “The New York Times” is responsible for the first use of an emoticon — ‘:)’ — when they misprint a transcribed copy of President Abraham Lincoln’s speech.
• 1881 – The first intentional use of emoticons is published by the American satirical magazine “Puck.”
• 1990 – Emoji, a Japanese expression, roughly means “picture word” and was created by Shigetaka Kurita in 1990. While working for the Japanese telecom company NTT Docomo, Kurita would design these picture words as a feature on their pagers to make them more appealing to teens.
• 1997 – AIM introduces its Buddy Icons, small images or icons conveying feelings.
• 1999 – The first emoji is created by Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita.
• 2007 – The release of the first iPhone by Apple in 2007 had an emoji keyboard embedded into the phone to nab the Japanese market. While not intended for U.S. users to find, they did and quickly figured out how to use it.
• 2010 – Unicode adopts emojis, adding new ones such as cat faces.
• 2013 – the word ‘emoji’ was officially added to the Oxford English Dictionary with the definition being “a small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion.”
• 2014 – 198 flags are added to the emoji selection.
• 2015 – Oxford’s 2015 word of the year was not a word at all, in fact, it was this emoji.
• 2020 – 117 new emojis are introduced, including a toothbrush, bubble tea, Transgender flag, black cat, and more.
• 2024 – A smiley face with bags under its eyes, a paint splatter, and a human fingerprint are among the new emoji concepts up for approval.
  • The draft Emoji 16.0 list also includes a root vegetable, a leafless tree, a harp, a shovel, and the flag of Sark, one of the Channel Islands.
• 2024 – These eight new emoji concepts are expected to be approved on Tuesday 10 September 2024 alongside Unicode 16.0. This will bring the total number of emojis by Unicode to 3,790.
• The word “Emoji” is derived from the Japanese words e (for picture) and moji (for character) the seeming connection to the words emotion and emoticon is purely incidental!
• 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. Over 1800 emojis cover much more than just emotions.
• 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.
• Over 900M emojis are sent every day without text on Facebook Messenger
• More than 700M emojis are used in Facebook posts every day.
• The biggest day for emoji usage on Messenger is New Year’s Eve.
• More negative emojis were used during 2016’s US Election than ever before.
• The ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ emoji remains a favorite on Twitter. In fact, it’s the most popular emoji on the platform with over 2,000,000,000 (two billion) uses according to Emojitracker.
• Only 7% of people use the peach emoji as a fruit.  The rest mostly use it as a butt or for other non-fruit uses.
• The winners of the 2019 World Emoji Awards are as follows:
  • Most Popular New Emoji:  
    • 1st Place: Smiling Face with Hearts
    • 2nd Place: Pleading Face
    • 3rd Place:  Woozy Face
  • Most Anticipated New Emoji: Maté
• 95% of Internet users have used an emoji. Over 10 billion emojis are sent daily.
• Including emojis in a Tweet can increase engagement by 25.4%. Adding emojis to a Facebook post can increase the number of post likes by 57% and the number of comments and shares by 33%.
• And 56% of brands that put emojis in their email subject lines had a higher unique open rate. Emoji marketing in digital channels can create quite an impact!
• The entirety of Moby Dick has been translated into a book entirely made up of emojis. Fred Benenson headed the project to translate every line of this classic Herman Melville work into emojis, and he dubbed it “Emoji Dick; or, ????”.
• The first popular emojis are on display in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
• For many parts of the world, the Thumbs Up Sign emoji or Thumbs Up emoji is a normal emoji that means affirmation or approval. However, in the Middle East, Australia, and Greece, this gesture is a form of profanity. For these cultures, the emoji translates roughly to “Up yours!”
• Coca-Cola was the first brand to use Twitter brand emojis or hash flags for a marketing event.
• You can turn your favorite photos into shareable emojis using various apps and online tools. The apps can be found in the Apple and Google stores.

Sources:

National Day Calendar

World Emoji Day

Go, Fisher

Facts

Emojipedia

National Today