Can you picture a world without emoticons when you text? Here’s how it all began.
The word emoji comes from the Japanese 絵 (“e,” picture), 文 (“mo,” write), and 字 (“ji,” character).
Japanese characters, or “kanji,” are largely based on Chinese ideograms, which already have a highly graphic writing system. The fact that the term “emoji” sounds like it was derived from the English word “emotion” is just coincidental.
Emojis have their own day, demonstrating how well they have blended into mainstream culture. The 17th of July is World Emoji Day. Why is this the case? iCal for Mac debuted on July 17, 2002, at the MacWorld Expo.
Origin of emojis
Hieroglyphics, which were drawings used by the ancient Egyptians to preserve their history and narratives, are a distant ancestor of emojis.
Modern emojis can be traced back to 1990s chatrooms, where they were first used to convey grins, show emotions, or emphasize comedy. Emoji used to look like this:):D:’ before they were pixelated and colored.
However, the current emoji is credited to Shigetaka Kurita, a Japanese designer. When he created the first emoji in 1999, Kurita had to work inside a 12 by 12 pixel grid.
A collection of 176 emojis for cell phones and pagers was produced in 1999 by the Japanese cell phone company NTT DOCOMO. To construct the first emoji library, Kurita employed Japanese graphic novels, the Zapf Dingbats typeface, pictures, and pictograms.
He told The Guardian. “I was a member of the team that spent over two years creating the initial emoji in preparation for the 1999 debut of i-mode, NTT DoCoMo’s mobile internet platform. We reasoned that since users could only use up to 250 characters in an email, emoji would be a quick and convenient way for them to converse. Additionally, utilizing mere words in a brief message could result in misconceptions. It’s challenging to express oneself.
Emojis allow you to be more expressive when texting. According to Emojipedia, the ‘face with tears of joy’ is the most commonly used emoji on Twitter. Furthermore, emoji usage on the site has increased significantly, with one in every five tweets now integrating an emoji, up from one in every ten tweets in 2014.
Every day, more than 900 million emoji messages (without text) are sent to Facebook Messenger. Emojis feature in roughly half of all Instagram comments. Remote workers use personalized emoticons in the Slack chat tool. All of this demonstrates how significant and popular emojis are. Without this fantastic idea, the online world would undoubtedly be dull and soulless.
