Fast forward 334 years and we have the evolution of the smiley emoticon. Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says that in September of 1982, he used three keystrokes
unofficial official language of internet chat rooms and forums. How else would the person on the other end know that you were flirting if you couldn’t ;-), or that you
Emoticons are a combination of “emotion” and “icons,” but emojis are something different. Related to the characters Fahlman helped create, emojis were born in Japan in the 1990s and were
Kurita was working on a project for a Japanese phone company NTT DOCOMO that involved creating its first internet service, iMode. NTT DOCOMO wanted to create symbols that would make
The name emoji, according to Kurita, has existed in Japan since the Edo era when similar symbols were used to teach prayers to the illiterate. The word comes from
The engineer came up with 200 designs based on anime and pictograms, which were later narrowed down to 176. The original emojis include symbols for the Sun, the phases of
"The service was a great hit,” Kurita said of iMode. “Emoji spread among teens and became very popular. I felt the most success when emoji were used on TV.
But that’s obviously not where things ended for the emoji. Around the mid-aughts, Google partnered with Japanese telecom carrier KDDI AU and began working to add emojis to Gmail. Ryan
Apple adopted emojis shortly after, and in 2009 the first emojis were added to the Unicode Consortium. R&B singer Trey Songz even made a song that year called “LOL Smiley
Almost every year since, there have been new emoji candidates submitted for consideration, but only a few have made the cut and have made their way to devices around the
In 2015, the Oxford Dictionary chose the “face with tears and joy” emoji as its “word” of the year, explaining that the symbol “best reflected the ethos, mood and preoccupations”
In 2015, emojis got a long overdue update that gave users the ability to change the skin tones of faces and hands, because not everyone is a pale, blond couple
In 2016, Apple updated its iOS with emojis for a female judge, female firefighter, female mechanic, the pride flag, and even more progressive and very necessary options.
Antonelli told NPR about the importance of the pictogram language. “I mean if you think about it, we cannot live without emojis today. We've become used into [sic] condensing
When asked if more contemporary emojis belong in the museum’s collection with the originals, Antonelli said that it is possible one day, but it would depend on the emoji. “My
In 2017, emojis were given their own animated feature film, “The Emoji Movie.” It was almost universally panned by audiences and critics alike, but still managed to make $217
There are some who lament the death of traditional forms of communication, arguing that technology and things like emojis and social media are producing a generation of kids who don’t
know how to engage face-to-face with other human beings, and who can’t properly express themselves with words. Then there are others who recognize that emoji is a language that is
If this entire introduction was written only in emojis, we bet most of you would be able to decipher at least half of what it said. From dancing ladies to heart-eyed cats, we use emojis on a daily basis to say what we want to say, but without having to actually find the right words.
It's a universal language that, in a relatively short amount of time, has taken over the connected world, but what do you know about how we got here?
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