Today the whole world celebrates the emoji

The emoji is central today: since 2014, World Emoji Day has been celebrated every year on July 17. On this day, we reflect on the worldwide impact of the colored figures that have been decorating our messages since the 1990s.

The holiday was created by Jeremy Burge, founder of emoji encyclopedia Emojipedia. World Emoji Day is celebrated today in the Empire State Building in New York, which will be painted an ’emoji yellow’.

Although icons, images that represent concepts or words, have been around for a long time, the first real emojis were only created in 1999 by the Japanese Shigetaka Kurita. He wanted to make the online text messages more like offline, face-to-face conversations where voice, volume and facial expressions are very important to get a message across clearly. Making digital faces was therefore logical to give text messages a little more nuance, for example.

However, it didn’t stop with the faces. Over the years, more and more emojis were added; currently we even have 2,666 that can be rendered via Unicode. Apple added an emoji keyboard to iOS devices in 2011, and from then on, the characters began to be widely used in social media outside Japan as well.

Although the word “emoji” seems to have the same origin as the word “emoticon”, the words have nothing to do with each other. The word ’emoticon’ comes from the portmanteau of emotion and icon while ’emoji’ is simply Japanese for icon.

The most used emoji on Twitter is the crying laughing emoji, according to the website Emojitracker. It has, at the time of writing, been used approximately 1.8 billion times. This emoji has been used so often that it was named “Word of the Year” in 2015 by Oxford Dictionaries. This was the first time an icon received this award.