According to Facebook, billions of emojis are sent online every day. The UN applauded the pictograms' ability to convey diversity. Others just liked the happy faces of smiling cats.
Image: Picture-alliance/F. May
Advertisement
Internet users, global institutions and even governments took to social media to celebrate World Emoji Day on Tuesday, declaring their love for the ubiquitous ideograms.
The unofficial holiday is celebrated on July 17 because that is the day on the calendar emoji.
The celebration was the brainchild of Jeremy Burge, an emoji historian who also works for Unicode, the firm that makes the symbols.
First invented in Japan in 1999, the word emoji comes from the Japanese words for picture and character. That emoji sounds like the English words emotion and emoticon is entirely coincidental.
Emojis achieved global prominence in the 2010s when they began to be included in the keyboards of most smartphone models. By 2015, Oxford Dictionaries named the "Face with Tears of Joy" emoji as its Word of the Year.
New emoji are decided on and introduced by a committee in the Unicode Consortium, a California-based nonprofit organization that ensures industry standards for how text is expressed in computing.
10 facts about emojis
LOL is going extinct, replaced by an ever-growing number of emojis used to express emotions online. How did the emoji hype actually start? Here's a look back at how the visual language developed.
Image: Getty Images/AFP/B. Mehri
Emojis take to the big screen
From the smartphone to the big screen: In "The Emoji Movie," director Tony Leondis brings viewers to Textopolis, the hometown of all emojis. Every emoji living there has a single expression, except Gene. With Hi-5 and Jailbreak, Gene goes on an adventurous quest in the world of apps to get his code repaired.
Image: Imago/Cinema Publishers Collection
It all started with the emoticon
Punctuation marks and other characters have long been used as "emoticons" - a combination of the words "emotion" and "icon." The US computer scientist Scott Fahlman is credited with being the first to officially propose on a message board the use of :-) as a smiley emoticon, in 1982. It would take over 30 years for the emoji hype to take off.
Image: Public Domain
Emojis were invented in Japan
In 1999, the Japanese software engineer Shigetaka Kurita developed the world's first 180 emojis (a Japanese term for ideograms). Unlike emoticons, his designs were little images made of encoded pixels. Through universal standards that were developed afterwards, they could quickly be sent to different devices. It was the beginning of a boom.
Image: Getty Images/AFP/B. Mehri
They 'belong' to a German
The inventor of the emoji did not make a fortune out his idea, even though his initial drawings are now exhibited at the MoMA. This German entrepreneur, Marco Hüsges, did. He became the trademark holder of emojis in 2015, and already has over 350 licensees, including major clothing companies. The film studio Sony Pictures also had to obtain a license from him for the new film.
Image: obs/emoji Company GmbH
The first emoji novel
Chinese artist Xu Bing's "Book from the Ground" (2014) is one that can be read by anyone, as it uses only symbols and icons that are universally understood. It depicts 24 hours in a day of a typical urban worker. It appears to have inspired tennis champion Roger Federer. He tweeted what happened during his day off with a series of emojis.
Image: Twitter/rogerfederer
Emojis are authorized in California
The Unicode Consortium is the body in charge of accepting new emojis. New ones are greenlighted once a year. Anyone can propose a new character; they need to be symbols that can be expected to be used frequently. The four emojis shown above, from Apple, have already been approved and will be released this year.
Image: Apple
Finland's identity as emojis
In 2015, Finland became the first country to release its national emojis. Along with the symbols depicted above, the Finnish symbols include a reindeer, an icebreaker and wool socks. Altogether, 56 images were created to describe the country's culture. One design was rejected by the Unicode Consortium: the Kalsarikännit emoji. The word describes getting drunk at home, alone in your underwear.
Until last year, it was still possible to send a pistol emoji on Apple's iOS. In September 2016, the company replaced the icon with a green water gun. The company has pursued its stance against weapons ever since. However, if you send the squirt gun emoji from an iPhone to an Android user, it will no longer look like a toy, but like a revolver.
Image: Apple
The first emoji to become a Word of the Year
In 2015, the Face With Tears of Joy emoji comprised nearly 20 percent of all emoji use in the UK, which is why Oxford Dictionaries picked it as its 2015 Word of the Year, marking a historic moment of recognition of the importance of emojis. Also known as the Crying Laughing emoji, it expresses laughter to the point of tears - but some people provocatively use it in an aggressive, ironic way.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Skolimowska
There is a World Emoji Day
A global celebration of emojis has been held since 2014, on July 17 - the date shown on the calendar emoji. Ahead of this year's Emoji Day, a Guinness World Record was set: the largest gathering of people dressed as emoji faces in multiple venues took place on July 15. Altogether, 531 fans dressed up in emoji costumes in Moscow, Dubai, Dublin, Sao Paulo and London (pictured).
Image: picture-alliance/empics/M. Alexander
10 images1 | 10
The United Nations celebrated World Emoji Day by showing how the characters can express diversity, after five different skin tones were added in 2015:
Others, like the US actor Kyle MacLachlan, celebrated their ability to convey a story by summarizing the classic science fiction novel Dune in emoji:
According to the advertising trade publication Ad Week, last year Facebook said that more than 60 million emojis were used on its main platform each day, and a staggering 5 billion were used daily on its mobile Messenger app.
