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Symbols often used as emotional cues in text From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An emoji (/ɪˈmoʊdʒiː/ ih-MOH-jee; plural emoji or emojis;[1] Japanese: 絵文字, Japanese pronunciation: [emoꜜʑi]) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram, or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of modern emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed conversation as well as to replace words as part of a logographic system.[2] Emoji exist in various genres, including facial expressions, expressions, activity, food and drinks, celebrations, flags, objects, symbols, places, types of weather, animals and nature.[3]
Originally meaning pictograph, the word emoji comes from Japanese e (絵, 'picture') + moji (文字, 'character'); the resemblance to the English words emotion and emoticon is purely coincidental.[4] The first emoji sets were created by Japanese portable electronic device companies in the late 1980s and the 1990s.[5] Emoji became increasingly popular worldwide in the 2010s after Unicode began encoding emoji into the Unicode Standard.[6][7][8] They are now considered to be a large part of popular culture in the West and around the world.[9][10] In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries named the Face with Tears of Joy emoji (😂) the word of the year.[11][12]
The emoji was predated by the emoticon,[13] a concept implemented in 1982 by computer scientist Scott Fahlman when he suggested text-based symbols such as :-) and :-( could be used to replace language.[14] Theories about language replacement can be traced back to the 1960s, when Russian novelist and professor Vladimir Nabokov stated in an interview with The New York Times: "I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile — some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket."[15] It did not become a mainstream concept until the 1990s, when Japanese, American, and European companies began developing Fahlman's idea.[16][17] Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope point out that similar symbology was incorporated by Bruce Parello, a student at the University of Illinois, into PLATO IV, the first e-learning system, in 1972.[18][19] The PLATO system was not considered mainstream, and therefore Parello's pictograms were only used by a small number of people.[20] Scott Fahlman's emoticons importantly used common alphabet symbols and aimed to replace language/text to express emotion, and for that reason are seen as the actual origin of emoticons.
The first emoji are a matter of contention due to differing definitions and poor early documentation.[21][5] It was previously widely considered that DoCoMo had the first emoji set in 1999, but an Emojipedia blog article in 2019 brought SoftBank's earlier 1997 set to light.[21] More recently, in 2024, earlier emoji sets were uncovered on portable devices by Sharp Corporation and NEC[22] in the early 1990s, with the 1988 Sharp PA-8500 harboring what can be defined as the earliest known emoji set that reflects emoji keyboards today.[23][5]
Wingdings, a font invented by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes, was released by Microsoft in 1990.[24] It could be used to send pictographs in rich text messages, but would only load on devices with the Wingdings font installed.[21] In 1995, the French newspaper Le Monde announced that Alcatel would be launching a new phone, the BC 600. Its welcome screen displayed a digital smiley face, replacing the usual text seen as part of the "welcome message" often seen on other devices at the time.[25] In 1997, SoftBank's J-Phone arm launched the SkyWalker DP-211SW, which contained a set of 90 emoji. Its designs, each measuring 12 by 12 pixels, were monochrome, depicting numbers, sports, the time, moon phases, and the weather. It contained the Pile of Poo emoji in particular.[21] The J-Phone model experienced low sales, and the emoji set was thus rarely used.[26]
In 1999, Shigetaka Kurita created 176 emoji as part of NTT DoCoMo's i-mode, used on its mobile platform.[27][28][29] They were intended to help facilitate electronic communication and to serve as a distinguishing feature from other services.[6] Due to their influence, Kurita's designs were once claimed to be the first cellular emoji;[21] however, Kurita has denied that this is the case.[30][31] According to interviews, he took inspiration from Japanese manga where characters are often drawn with symbolic representations called manpu (such as a water drop on a face representing nervousness or confusion), and weather pictograms used to depict the weather conditions at any given time. He also drew inspiration from Chinese characters and street sign pictograms.[29][32][33] The DoCoMo i-Mode set included facial expressions, such as smiley faces, derived from a Japanese visual style commonly found in manga and anime, combined with kaomoji and smiley elements.[34] Kurita's work is displayed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.[35]
Kurita's emoji were brightly colored, albeit with a single color per glyph. General-use emoji, such as sports, actions, and weather, can readily be traced back to Kurita's emoji set.[36] Notably absent from the set were pictograms that demonstrated emotion. The yellow-faced emoji in current use evolved from other emoticon sets and cannot be traced back to Kurita's work.[36] His set also had generic images much like the J-Phones. Elsewhere in the 1990s, Nokia phones began including preset pictograms in its text messaging app, which they defined as "smileys and symbols".[37] A third notable emoji set was introduced by Japanese mobile phone brand au by KDDI.[21][38]
The basic 12-by-12-pixel emoji in Japan grew in popularity across various platforms over the next decade. While emoji adoption was high in Japan during this time, the competitors failed to collaborate to create a uniform set of emoji to be used across all platforms in the country.[39]
The Universal Coded Character Set (Unicode), controlled by the Unicode Consortium and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2, had already been established as the international standard for text representation (ISO/IEC 10646) since 1993, although variants of Shift JIS remained relatively common in Japan. Unicode included several characters which would subsequently be classified as emoji, including some from North American or Western European sources such as DOS code page 437, ITC Zapf Dingbats, or the WordPerfect Iconic Symbols set.[40][41] Unicode coverage of written characters was extended several times by new editions during the 2000s, with little interest in incorporating the Japanese cellular emoji sets (deemed out of scope),[42] although symbol characters which would subsequently be classified as emoji continued to be added. For example, Unicode 4.0 contained 16 new emoji, which included direction arrows, a warning triangle, and an eject button.[43] Besides Zapf Dingbats, other dingbat fonts such as Wingdings or Webdings also included additional pictographic symbols in their own custom pi font encodings; unlike Zapf Dingbats, however, many of these would not be available as Unicode emoji until 2014.[44]
Nicolas Loufrani applied to the US Copyright Office in 1999 to register the 471 smileys that he created.[45] Soon after he created The Smiley Dictionary, which not only hosted the largest number of smileys at the time, it also categorized them.[46] The desktop platform was aimed at allowing people to insert smileys as text when sending emails and writing on a desktop computer.[47] By 2003, it had grown to 887 smileys and 640 ascii emotions.[48]
The smiley toolbar offered a variety of symbols and smileys and was used on platforms such as MSN Messenger.[49] Nokia, then one of the largest global telecom companies, was still referring to today's emoji sets as smileys in 2001.[50] The digital smiley movement was headed up by Nicolas Loufrani, the CEO of The Smiley Company.[47] He created a smiley toolbar, which was available at smileydictionary.com during the early 2000s to be sent as emoji.[51] Over the next two years, The Smiley Dictionary became the plug-in of choice for forums and online instant messaging platforms. There were competitors, but The Smiley Dictionary was the most popular. Platforms such as MSN Messenger allowed for customisation from 2001 onwards, with many users importing emoticons to use in messages as text. These emoticons would eventually go on to become the modern-day emoji. It was not until MSN Messenger and BlackBerry noticed the popularity of these unofficial sets and launched their own from late 2003 onwards.[52]
The first American company to take notice of emoji was Google beginning in 2007. In August 2007, a team made up of Mark Davis and his colleagues Kat Momoi and Markus Scherer began petitioning the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) in an attempt to standardise the emoji.[53] The UTC, having previously deemed emoji to be out of scope for Unicode, made the decision to broaden its scope to enable compatibility with the Japanese cellular carrier formats which were becoming more widespread.[42] Peter Edberg and Yasuo Kida joined the collaborative effort from Apple Inc. shortly after, and their official UTC proposal came in January 2009 with 625 new emoji characters. Unicode accepted the proposal in 2010.[53]
Pending the assignment of standard Unicode code points, Google and Apple implemented emoji support via Private Use Area schemes. Google first introduced emoji in Gmail in October 2008, in collaboration with au by KDDI,[38] and Apple introduced the first release of Apple Color Emoji to iPhone OS on 21 November 2008.[54] Initially, Apple's emoji support was implemented for holders of a SoftBank SIM card; the emoji themselves were represented using SoftBank's Private Use Area scheme and mostly resembled the SoftBank designs.[55] Gmail emoji used their own Private Use Area scheme in a supplementary Private Use plane.[56][57]
Separately, a proposal had been submitted in 2008 to add the ARIB extended characters used in broadcasting in Japan to Unicode. This included several pictographic symbols.[58] These were added in Unicode 5.2 in 2009, a year before the cellular emoji sets were fully added; they include several characters which either also appeared amongst the cellular emoji[56] or were subsequently classified as emoji.[59]
After iPhone users in the United States discovered that downloading Japanese apps allowed access to the keyboard, pressure grew to expand the availability of the emoji keyboard beyond Japan.[60] The Emoji application for iOS, which altered the Settings app to allow access to the emoji keyboard, was created by Josh Gare in February 2010.[61] Before the existence of Gare's Emoji app, Apple had intended for the emoji keyboard to only be available in Japan in iOS version 2.2.[62]
Throughout 2009, members of the Unicode Consortium and national standardization bodies of various countries gave feedback and proposed changes to the international standardization of the emoji. The feedback from various bodies in the United States, Europe, and Japan agreed on a set of 722 emoji as the standard set. This would be released in October 2010 in Unicode 6.0.[63] Apple made the emoji keyboard available to those outside of Japan in iOS version 5.0 in 2011.[64] Later, Unicode 7.0 (June 2014) added the character repertoires of the Webdings and Wingdings fonts to Unicode, resulting in approximately 250 more Unicode emoji.[44]
The Unicode emoji whose code points were assigned in 2014 or earlier are therefore taken from several sources. A single character could exist in multiple sources, and characters from a source were unified with existing characters where appropriate: for example, the "shower" weather symbol (☔️) from the ARIB source was unified with an existing umbrella with raindrops character,[65] which had been added for KPS 9566 compatibility.[66] The emoji characters named "Rain" ("雨", ame) from all three Japanese carriers were in turn unified with the ARIB character.[56] However, the Unicode Consortium groups the most significant sources of emoji into four categories:[67]
Source category | Abbreviations | Unicode version (year) | Included sources | Example |
---|---|---|---|---|
Zapf Dingbats | ZDings, z | 1.0 (1991) | ITC Zapf Dingbats Series 100 | ❣️ (U+2763 ← 0xA3)[68] |
ARIB | ARIB, a | 5.2 (2008) | ARIB STD-B24 Volume 1 extended Shift JIS | ⛩️ (U+26E9 ← 0xEE4B)[69] |
Japanese carriers | JCarrier, j | 6.0 (2010) | NTT DoCoMo mobile Shift JIS | 🎠 (U+1F3A0 ← 0xF8DA)[70] |
au by KDDI mobile Shift JIS | 📌 (U+1F4CC ← 0xF78A)[70] | |||
SoftBank 3G mobile Shift JIS | 💒 (U+1F492 ← 0xFB7D)[70] | |||
Wingdings and Webdings | WDings, w | 7.0 (2014) | Webdings | 🛳️ (U+1F6F3 ← 0x54)[71] |
Wingdings | 🏵️ (U+1F3F5 ← 0x7B)[71] | |||
Wingdings 2 | 🖍️ (U+1F58D ← 0x24)[71] | |||
Wingdings 3 | ▶️ (U+25B6 ← 0x75)[71][lower-alpha 1] |