emoji

Emoji are pictographs encoded as text characters, so they can be typed, sent, and searched like letters. The modern form began in Japan, where mobile phones and pagers of the 1990s already carried small pictures. The best-known early set was designed in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita, then working on NTT Docomo's i-mode mobile internet service. Kurita drew 176 symbols on a grid of 12 by 12 pixels, drawing on weather icons, street signs, and the visual shorthand of manga, so that short messages could carry mood and meaning in very little space. In 2016 the Museum of Modern Art in New York added his original set to its collection.

For years each Japanese carrier used its own incompatible symbols, and a picture sent from one network might arrive as a blank box on another. The solution came through the Unicode Consortium, the nonprofit body that assigns a code number to every character in the world's writing systems. After proposals from engineers at Google and Apple, Unicode 6.0, released in October 2010, added hundreds of emoji. Apple made an emoji keyboard available to iPhone users worldwide with iOS 5 in 2011, and Android systems followed, turning a Japanese convenience into a global habit.

Unicode still decides which emoji exist. Anyone may submit a proposal, and a subcommittee judges it on factors such as expected use and distinctiveness. Each code point is then drawn differently by Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, and others, which is why the same emoji can look cheerful on one phone and awkward on another. In 2015 Unicode 8.0 introduced five skin-tone modifiers based on the Fitzpatrick scale used in dermatology, and later releases added gender variants, families, and people with disabilities.

Emoji differ from emoticons, which are faces built from ordinary keyboard characters. The computer scientist Scott Fahlman proposed the sideways smiley :-) on a Carnegie Mellon University message board in 1982 to mark jokes. Emoji perform a similar job: researchers describe them as the digital equivalent of tone of voice and facial expression, softening criticism, signaling irony, or replacing a reply altogether.

Their cultural weight became clear in 2015, when Oxford Dictionaries chose the Face with Tears of Joy emoji as its word of the year. World Emoji Day, started in 2014 by Jeremy Burge, the founder of the reference site Emojipedia, is held on 17 July, the date shown on the calendar emoji. Emoji have also entered law. In 2023 a court in Saskatchewan, Canada, ruled that a farmer's thumbs-up reply to a photographed contract counted as acceptance of the agreement.