The History of Emojis

Somewhere around 6 billion emojis get sent every single day. That's not a typo. Six billion tiny pictures flying through the internet, adding nuance to our messages, replacing words entirely, and occasionally causing confusion when someone interprets 🙃 differently than you intended.

But here's the thing—this entire phenomenon started with one guy in Japan trying to solve a very specific problem. And the story of how we got from there to here is weirder than you'd expect.

Before Emojis: The Era of :-)

Before we had actual pictures, we made do with text. On September 19, 1982, a computer scientist named Scott Fahlman at Carnegie Mellon University typed out what might be the most influential punctuation sequence in internet history:

"I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-)"

That's it. Colon, dash, parenthesis. Fahlman suggested using it on message boards to indicate when something was meant as a joke, since tone doesn't translate well in text. He also proposed :-( for things that weren't jokes.

These "emoticons" spread fast. Within months, people were using them across university networks. Within years, they were everywhere. But they had limitations—you had to tilt your head to see them, and there's only so much emotion you can express with punctuation marks.

1999: The Birth of Emoji in Japan

The word "emoji" comes from Japanese: 絵 (e = picture) + 文字 (moji = character). And the story starts with a 25-year-old artist named Shigetaka Kurita.

Kurita worked at NTT DoCoMo, Japan's largest mobile carrier, which was launching a new mobile internet service called i-mode. The problem? Messages were limited to 250 characters. That's brutal when you're trying to communicate anything meaningful.

Kurita's solution was brilliantly simple: create a set of tiny 12×12 pixel icons that could convey ideas more efficiently than words. A heart could replace "I love you." A sun could replace weather descriptions. He designed 176 of them, drawing inspiration from manga, weather forecasts, Chinese characters, and street signs.

The timing was perfect. Japanese mobile users embraced emojis immediately. By the early 2000s, competing carriers like SoftBank and au developed their own emoji sets. The only problem? None of them were compatible with each other. Send an emoji from one carrier to another, and it might show up as a completely different symbol—or just a blank square.

The Standardization Problem

For almost a decade, emojis remained a Japanese thing. The rest of the world was still typing :D and <3 while Japan had hundreds of actual pictures to use. But the incompatibility issue was getting worse, not better.

Enter Google. In 2007, a team of Google engineers—including Mark Davis, who helped create Unicode—started pushing for emoji standardization. Their argument: if emojis are going to exist, they should work the same way everywhere.

The Unicode Consortium, the non-profit that standardizes text encoding for every computer system in the world, agreed to take on the project. In October 2010, Unicode 6.0 officially added 722 emojis to the standard. For the first time, an emoji sent from a Japanese phone could theoretically display correctly on an American computer.

I say "theoretically" because each platform still designs its own emoji art. That's why Apple's 😬 looks noticeably different from Google's version—same underlying code, different visual interpretation.

2011: Apple Changes Everything

Unicode standardization was important, but the real turning point came in October 2011 when Apple added an emoji keyboard to iOS 5. Suddenly, 93 million iPhone users could access emojis with a single tap.

The impact was immediate. Within months, emojis went from "that Japanese thing" to a standard part of digital communication worldwide. Android followed with native emoji support. Windows added them. They were everywhere.

By 2015, the "Face with Tears of Joy" emoji (😂) was named Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year. Not a word, technically—but they made an exception because it had become the most-used emoji globally, appearing in 20% of all emoji usage in the UK and 17% in the US.

Timeline: Key Moments in Emoji History

The Diversity Push

Early emojis had a problem: they were pretty homogeneous. The people emojis were all yellow (ostensibly neutral, but often read as white), and representation of different cultures, genders, and abilities was minimal.

This started changing in 2015 when Unicode 8.0 introduced skin tone modifiers—five different shades based on the Fitzpatrick scale used by dermatologists. Now 👋 could become 👋🏻, 👋🏼, 👋🏽, 👋🏾, or 👋🏿.

The push for representation has continued ever since. Some notable additions:

• 2016: The hijab emoji (🧕), proposed by 15-year-old Rayouf Alhumedhi from Saudi Arabia
• 2019: People with disabilities, including wheelchairs, prosthetic limbs, and guide dogs
• 2020: Gender-neutral people emoji options
• 2021: Couples with different skin tone combinations

The process isn't perfect—getting a new emoji approved takes about two years and requires a formal proposal to Unicode. But the set has become dramatically more inclusive than those original 176 icons.

Emojis as Language

Here's an interesting debate linguists have been having: are emojis a language?

The short answer is no—they don't have grammar, syntax, or the ability to express complex abstract ideas independently. You can't write a philosophy paper in pure emoji.

But they do something interesting that words alone can't: they add emotional context. "Sure" means something different from "Sure 😊" which means something different from "Sure 🙄". In that sense, emojis function like tone of voice in spoken conversation—they tell you how to interpret the words around them.

They also evolve like language. 💀 originally meant death or danger. Now it predominantly means "I'm dead" (from laughing). 🍑 is officially a peach, but... you know. Meanings shift based on how communities actually use these symbols, not what Unicode says they mean.

Cultural Differences

Emojis might seem universal, but interpretation varies by culture. A few examples:

• 👍 Thumbs up: Positive in most Western countries, potentially offensive in parts of the Middle East
• 🙏 Folded hands: "Thank you" or "please" in the West, often a greeting in Japan, sometimes interpreted as prayer
• 😊 Smiling face: Friendly in the US, can seem passive-aggressive to younger generations or insincere in some Asian contexts

This isn't unique to emojis—gestures have always varied across cultures. But it's worth remembering that "universal" symbols aren't always as universal as they seem.

The Technical Side

Every emoji has a unique Unicode code point—a specific number that identifies it across all systems. The grinning face 😀 is U+1F600. The heart ❤️ is U+2764.

When you type an emoji, your device sends that code. The receiving device looks up that code and displays its own version of the artwork. That's why emojis look different on iPhone vs Android vs Windows—they're all interpreting the same code with different designs.

Some emojis are actually multiple codes combined. Family emojis, for example, use something called Zero Width Joiner (ZWJ) to combine individual people emojis into a group. 👨‍👩‍👧 is technically three separate person codes glued together with invisible ZWJ characters.

What's Next?

The emoji library keeps growing. Unicode adds new emojis every year based on proposals from anyone willing to submit one (there's a formal process, but it's public).

Some trends we're seeing:

• More customizable emojis (Apple's Memoji, for example)
• Animated and reactive emojis in messaging apps
• Integration with AR and VR environments
• Continued expansion of representation and cultural symbols

There's also ongoing tension between adding more emojis (users want them) and keeping the set manageable (too many makes them hard to find and use). Unicode has become more selective about approvals in recent years.

From 176 to 3,600+

In 25 years, emojis went from a Japanese workaround for character limits to a communication system used by billions of people daily. They've been in museums, in movies (The Emoji Movie grossed $217 million, somehow), and in court as evidence.

Are they a replacement for language? No. But they've become something we didn't really have before—a way to add feeling to text, quickly and universally recognizable. The 😊 at the end of a message changes how you read everything before it. That's kind of remarkable for a bunch of tiny pictures.

Shigetaka Kurita couldn't have predicted any of this when he was sketching 12×12 pixel icons in 1999. He was just trying to help people say more with less. Twenty-five years later, we're all speaking his visual language. 🎉