Three Japanese words—“e” for picture, “mo” for write, and “ji” for character—combine to form the term “emoji”.1)
Shigetaka Kurita invented the first emojis in 1999. For use in the email system at his firm, Kurita produced 176 emojis. Emojis became a global craze in 2010 after being embraced by Unicode coders.2)
Emojis were originally produced in Japan, where they became immediately famous, but it took more than ten years for them to spread to other countries.3)
Emoji's originator, Shigetaka Kurita, was first informed by his employer that he could not include an emoji for “poop” in his collection; it was left for further contributors to add.4)
In 2011, Apple added a dedicated Emoji keyboard to iOS.5)
There are presently 3,664 emojis in Unicode's list of approved symbols.6)
Since 2013, the “face with tears of joy” emoji has been used over 23 billion times on Twitter, according to Emojitracker, which released this information in 2018.7)
The original emoji set was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York for their collections in 2016.8)
The 2017 film The Emoji Movie presently has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 6%.9)
Fan Emojis are used only in Jesse Hill's unofficial rendition of Beyonce's “Drunk in Love” song.10)
To finance the creation of an emoji version of the American classic Moby Dick, Fred Benenson organized a successful Kickstarter campaign. Every single line from the original book is paired with a string of emoji counterparts in “Emoji Dick”.11)
The White House published an economic report with emoji illustrations.12)
The “face with tears of joy” emoji was chosen as Oxford Dictionary's “Word” of the Year for 2015.13)
The emoji subcommittee of the Unicode Consortium meets twice a week due to the overwhelming number of requests for new emojis to be included in their official vocabulary.14)
Unicode added the ability to alter an emoji's skin tone in 2015 in response to complaints about the lack of diversity in the emojis.15)
Mythical creatures including elves, mermaids, and vampires were introduced to the collection in a 2017 Unicode Emoji update.16)
Three age- and gender-neutral emojis are included in the official Emoji dictionary.17)
The “very startled” emoji was largely modeled after Edvard Munch's masterpiece The Scream.18)
A mosquito emoji was developed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to communicate the symptoms of mosquito-borne diseases like Zika and malaria to those who are illiterate.19)
Apple's “Animoji” technology analyzes a user's emotions and turns them into the faces of various emojis, including animals, robots, and piles of poop.20)
Emojis from both Apple and Android have been streamlined to maintain consistency between platforms.21)
An invitation to meet up at a Japanese “love hotel”, where rooms may be hired by the hour, was initially represented by an emoji with a building below a pink heart.22)
The two-women with black bunny ears emoji, which is typically used to denote friendliness, was really inspired by a Playboy Bunny-like character called the Bunny Woman from Japan.23)
The Beefeater emoji is intended to represent Britain's ceremonial guards, but perplexed Americans occasionally mistake it for “sketchy dude”.24)
The word “cheese” in general is frequently represented by the pizza emoji.25)
Linguistic specialists point out that one distinction between Emoji and other means of communication is that adding more of the same emojis may change the meaning of an idea, but repeating oneself in writing or speech merely makes us seem repetitious “cheese” generally.26)
Users can select between a camel with one or two humps from two available emojis of camels.27)
Emoji, according to some linguists, is the first truly worldwide language.28)
Three firearm emojis were mixed with the symbol for a police officer in a 2015 Facebook message that was posted by an American kid who was later detained for terrorism.29)
Andy Murray, a tennis player, gained attention in 2015 when he sent a pre-wedding Tweet explaining his preparations using just emojis.30)