Other landmark moments in the evolution of ideograms include a crowd-funded translation of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” into emoji titled, you guessed it, “Emoji Dick” ( In 2015, the Oxford English Dictionary gave language purists good reason for collective eye-rolling when it declared “emoji” - specifically the “Face with Tears of Joy” - to be its word of the year. The consortium, a nonprofit, oversees and standardizes the ever-expanding catalog of emoji, which are essentially a short sequence of digits and letters.Īpple’s inclusion of an emoji keyboard on the iPhone 5’s operating system in 2011 effectively turned emoji from being a quirky Japanese thing into a global communication tool. | ISTOCKĪlthough largely unheralded, the adoption of emoji into Unicode, a standard system for indexing characters, by the Unicode Consortium in 2010 allowed tech giants such as Apple and Google to include emoji options on their messaging platforms. Wide appeal: An estimated 92 percent of people use emoji when communicating online. writer Matt Alt wrote on The New Yorker website. “Just as a fleet of American gunboats had sailed in unannounced to open Japanese harbors to the world in the 1850s, America’s dominant tech companies had, in one fell swoop, paved the way to unleash Japan’s emoji onto phones around the world,” Tokyo-based U.S. companies looking to expand into overseas markets, the time was ripe for emoji to go global. However, with social media taking off and U.S. Outside of the country, however, users were slow to start using the ideograms, owing in part to the closed, complex and competitive matrix operated by different mobile phone operators in Japan. Kurita’s manga- and kanji-inspired emoji were wholeheartedly embraced by mobile phone users in Japan. In 1999, Kurita and his team released a set of 176 pixelated symbols that - while probably appearing ancient by contemporary digital standards - are the forbearers of the complex and ever-increasing set of emoji that people use today.
The first modern emoji was created by Shigetaka Kurita, who was part of a team given the task of preparing for the February 1999 debut of NTT Docomo’s mobile internet platform. They are a product of our nascent social media age, and yet their future is far from assured.Įmoji - a compound of the Japanese words “e” (“picture”) and “moji” (“character”) - are essentially pictograms of the variety that humanity has been inscribing on walls since at least 9,000 B.C.įast forward to the 1990s and the country’s youth were trading the precursors to emoji - emoticons such as smiley faces and dotted hearts - on their pagers as the digital age flourished. These ideograms are inescapable and, despite what critics say about their negative effect on language, they can leverage our online communications with nuance, subtlety and fun.