DiscoverScroll article

An emoji ( əm-OH-jee; plural emoji or emojis; Japanese: 絵文字, pronounced ) is a pictogram, logogram, or ideogram embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages.

The primary function of modern emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed conversation as well as to replace words as part of a logographic system. The first emoji sets were created by Japanese portable electronic device companies in the late 1980s and the 1990s. The word emoji comes from Japanese e (絵; 'picture') + moji (文字; 'character') and originally meant 'pictograph'; the resemblance to the English words emotion and emoticon is purely coincidental. Emoji became increasingly popular worldwide in the 2010s after Unicode began encoding emoji into the Unicode Standard. In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries named the emoji U+1F602 😂 FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY its word of the year.

The first emoji sets – character sets or font families with an array of different modern emoji – are a matter of contention due to differing definitions and poor early documentation. More recently, in 2024, earlier emoji sets were uncovered on portable devices by Sharp Corporation and NEC in the early 1990s, with the 1988 Sharp PA-8500 harboring what can be defined as the earliest known emoji set that reflects emoji keyboards today. The earliest known use of 絵文字 (the Japanese word for emoji) appearing next to a recognisable set of emoji symbols is in the manual for the Toshiba JW 95F Rupo word processor from 1988, which also contains a seahorse emoji that has often been quoted as a Mandela effect since the introduction of emoji into Unicode. Google first introduced emoji in Gmail in October 2008, in collaboration with au by KDDI, and Apple introduced the first release of Apple Color Emoji to iPhone OS on 21 November 2008. These were added in Unicode 5.2 in 2009, a year before the cellular emoji sets were fully added; they include several characters which either also appeared amongst the cellular emoji or were subsequently classified as emoji. Before the existence of Gare's Emoji app, Apple had intended for the emoji keyboard to only be available in Japan in iOS version 2.2. Also in January 2015, the use of the zero-width joiner to indicate that a sequence of emoji could be shown as a single equivalent grapheme (analogous to a ligature) as a means of implementing emoji without atomic code points, such as varied compositions of families, was discussed within the "emoji ad-hoc committee". Also in June 2015, the first approved version ("Emoji 1.0") of the Unicode Emoji report was published as Unicode Technical Report #51 (UTR #51). Maintenance of UTR #51, taking emoji requests, and creating proposals for emoji characters and emoji mechanisms was made the responsibility of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee (ESC), operating as a subcommittee of the Unicode Technical Committee.

In January 2017, in what is believed to be the first large-scale study of emoji usage, researchers at the University of Michigan analyzed over 1.2 billion messages input via the Kika Emoji Keyboard and announced that U+1F602 😂 FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY was the most popular emoji.

The plain Segoe UI font lacks emoji characters, whereas Segoe UI Symbol and Segoe UI Emoji include them.

As of Unicode version 17.0, Fitzpatrick modifiers can be used with 133 human emoji spread across seven blocks: Dingbats, Emoticons, Miscellaneous Symbols, Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs, Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs, Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A, and Transport and Map Symbols.

Unicode 17.0 specifies a total of 3,953 emoji using 1,438 characters spread across 24 blocks, of which 26 are Regional indicator symbols that combine in pairs to form flag emoji, and 12 (#, * and 0–9) are base characters for keycap emoji sequences.

Blob emoji – Set of emoji by Google

Quick Facts

• Emoji became increasingly popular worldwide in the 2010s after Unicode began encoding emoji into the Unicode Standard.
• Maintenance of UTR #51, taking emoji requests, and creating proposals for emoji characters and emoji mechanisms was made the responsibility of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee (ESC), operating as a subcommittee of the Unicode Technical Committee.
• Blob emoji – Set of emoji by Google
• In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries named the emoji U+1F602 😂 FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY its word of the year.
• These were added in Unicode 5.2 in 2009, a year before the cellular emoji sets were fully added; they include several characters which either also appeared amongst the cellular emoji or were subsequently classified as emoji.

Source material: Wikipedia - "Emoji". Adapted and summarized for DiscoverScroll. Original contributors are credited through the linked Wikipedia article. Read original on Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes were made from the original.