It is hard to imagine messaging without emoji. Billions of them are sent every day, and they have become part of how people express feelings in writing. But emoji are surprisingly young, and their story starts with a few punctuation marks typed on a university message board. Here is a short history of how we got from :-) to Γ°ΕΈΛβ¬.
1982: The first smiley
In September 1982, computer scientist Scott Fahlman posted a message to an online bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University. Users kept misreading jokes as serious statements, so he suggested marking jokes with :-) and serious posts with :-(. Tilt your head, and you see a face. The idea spread across early networks, and the emoticon was born.
Emoticons evolve
Through the 1980s and 1990s, users invented countless variations: ;-) for a wink, :-P for a tongue out, :-D for a big grin. In Japan, a different style appeared, called kaomoji, which is read upright rather than sideways: (^_^) for a smile and (T_T) for crying. Kaomoji grew remarkably expressive, with elaborate creations like ΓΒ―\_(Γ£Ζβ)_/ΓΒ― for a shrug.
1999: The first emoji set
In Japan, mobile phones were becoming popular for messaging. In 1999, designer Shigetaka Kurita created a set of 176 simple pictures, 12 by 12 pixels each, for the mobile internet service i-mode. They included weather symbols, hearts, faces and everyday objects. The word "emoji" comes from Japanese: "e" meaning picture and "moji" meaning character. The resemblance to the English word "emotion" is a coincidence. Kurita's original set is now part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
2010: Unicode makes emoji global
For years, emoji only worked within Japanese carriers, and each company used its own codes. The breakthrough came when emoji were added to Unicode, the international standard that assigns a number to every character in every writing system. From 2010 onward, an emoji sent from one device could be displayed on another, regardless of brand. When Apple added an emoji keyboard to iPhones worldwide in 2011, adoption exploded.
Diversity and new combinations
In 2015, skin tone modifiers arrived, letting users choose from five tones for people emoji. Later updates added more gender options, families of different compositions, people with disabilities and many cultural foods and symbols. Many of these are built by combining existing emoji with an invisible joiner character, so a single image on your screen can actually be several characters underneath.
Who decides on new emoji?
New emoji are approved by the Unicode Consortium. Anyone can submit a proposal, but it must show evidence of likely demand and distinctiveness. Each year, a new batch is approved and then appears on phones after platform updates.
Emoji today
Emoji have moved far beyond text messages. They appear in marketing, in courtrooms as evidence of intent, and in classrooms as teaching tools. People even write whole sentences in emoji as a game. If you want to try it, Emoji Translator turns ordinary text into emoji and back, which is a fun way to see how expressive these little pictures have become.
From a sideways smile typed to clarify a joke, to thousands of standardized pictures used worldwide, emoji show how people always find ways to put feeling into writing. The next chapter is still being written, one new symbol at a time.
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