Let Emojis Do The Talking For You!

Bhubaneswar: As human beings, our natural tendency is stimuli and an emotion to each reaction. In a world where texting has become a norm, expressing our emotions becomes the most difficult task. A solution to this is ‘Emojis’, or tiny graphics depicting various emotions and actions like- “Hey!”, “Love”, “Hi5!”, “Face-palm”, “Whatever” and even “Disgust”!

As the world celebrates World Emoji Day today, let’s draw the curtains aside to see what they mean, their history and popularity.

Emojis, what? ?

In a generic definition, emoji is a small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion in electronic communication. The term comes from the Japanese, e-picture and moji- character/letter.

Since July 17 is displayed on the ? Calendar Emoji, this date is chosen to be celebrated as the Emoji Day. Founder of Emojipedia (a Wikipedia for emojis), Jeremy Burge created this emoji and picked the day from the iPhone emoji for the calendar.

There also is a website World Emoji Day giving a better insight into this. Our favourite is the anthem they have uploaded! Description: ?

The first emoticons (English word meaning emoji, which in fact, is coincidental) appeared in an issue of Puck magazine way back in 1881. Published in it were four ‘faces’- conveying joy, melancholy, indifference and astonishment. They were termed as ‘typographical art’.

The first use of emojis as a way of communicating online was in 1982 when a faculty member of Carnegie Mellon University, Scott Fahlman introduced symbols to differentiate between jokes and serious posts on a digital message board. While 🙂 denoted humorous posts, 🙁 was for serious ones.

The little pictures, however, were created in 1998 by Shigetaka Kurita. He was an engineer at the Japanese phone company NTT Docomo and was working on a way for customers to communicate through icons. What he came up with was a set of 176 icons called emoji. He drew inspiration for his emojis from manga, Chinese characters and international signs for bathrooms. His original emojis are now part of the permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Today, there are 2,823 emojis in the Unicode Standard. India is among the top 10 countries that use most number of emojis.

And the most popular emoji award goes to…?

Emojis are widely used on Facebook and Twitter. As per the data revealed on Emojipedia, five billion emojis are sent daily on Facebook messenger. People across the globe are using the red heart emoji twice as much as they did last year.

On Twitter, Emojipedia posted the most frequently used emojis and most popular emojis used globally.

Let’s talk emojis!