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⁾