Each of the most popular emoji from the 9 major emoji categories according to the Unicode Emoji Frequency study from 2021, rendered in the Noto Color Emoji font.
Anemoji (/ɪˈmoʊdʒi/im-OH-jee; pluralemoji oremojis;[1]Japanese:絵文字,pronounced[emoꜜʑi]) is apictogram,logogram,ideogram, orsmiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages andweb pages. The primary function of modern emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed conversation as well as to replace words as part of alogographic system.[2] Emoji exist in various genres, including facial expressions, expressions, activity, food and drinks, celebrations, flags, objects, symbols, places, types of weather, animals, and nature.[3]
Originally meaning pictograph, the wordemoji comes from Japanesee (絵, 'picture') + moji (文字, 'character');[4] the resemblance to the English wordsemotion andemoticon ispurely coincidental.[5] The first emoji sets were created by Japanese portable electronic device companies in the late 1980s and the 1990s.[6] Emoji became increasingly popular worldwide in the 2010s afterUnicode began encoding emoji into the Unicode Standard.[7][8][9] They are now considered to be a large part ofpopular culture inthe West and around the world.[10][11] In 2015,Oxford Dictionaries named theFace with Tears of Joy emoji (😂) theword of the year.[12][13]
The emoji was predated by theemoticon,[14] a concept implemented in 1982 by computer scientistScott Fahlman when he suggested text-based symbols such as :-) and :-( could be used to replace language.[15] Theories about language replacement can be traced back to the 1960s, when Russian novelist and professorVladimir Nabokov stated in an interview withThe New York Times: "I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile — some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket."[16] It did not become a mainstream concept until the 1990s, when Japanese, American, and European companies began developing Fahlman's idea.[17][18]Mary Kalantzis andBill Cope point out that similar symbology was incorporated by Bruce Parello, a student at theUniversity of Illinois, intoPLATO IV, the firste-learning system, in 1972.[19][20] The PLATO system was not considered mainstream, and therefore Parello'spictograms were only used by a small number of people.[21]Scott Fahlman's emoticons importantly used common alphabet symbols and aimed to replace language/text to express emotion, and for that reason are seen as the actual origin of emoticons.
The first emoji are a matter of contention due to differing definitions and poor early documentation.[22][6] It was previously widely considered that DoCoMo had the first emoji set in 1999, but anEmojipedia blog article in 2019 broughtSoftBank's earlier 1997 set to light.[22] More recently, in 2024, earlier emoji sets were uncovered on portable devices bySharp Corporation andNEC[23] in the early 1990s, with the 1988 Sharp PA-8500 harboring what can be defined as the earliest known emoji set that reflects emoji keyboards today.[24][6]
Wingdings icons, including smiling and frowning faces
Wingdings, a font invented byCharles Bigelow andKris Holmes, was released byMicrosoft in 1990.[25] It could be used to send pictographs inrich text messages, but would only load on devices with the Wingdings font installed.[22] In 1995, the French newspaperLe Monde announced thatAlcatel would be launching a new phone, the BC 600. Its welcome screen displayed a digital smiley face, replacing the usual text seen as part of the "welcome message" often seen on other devices at the time.[26] In 1997, SoftBank'sJ-Phone arm launched the SkyWalker DP-211SW, which contained a set of 90 emoji. Its designs, each measuring 12 by 12 pixels, weremonochrome, depicting numbers, sports, the time,moon phases, and the weather. It contained thePile of Poo emoji in particular.[22] The J-Phone model experienced low sales, and the emoji set was thus rarely used.[27]
In 1999,Shigetaka Kurita created 176 emoji as part ofNTT DoCoMo'si-mode, used on its mobile platform.[28][29][30] They were intended to help facilitate electronic communication and to serve as a distinguishing feature from other services.[7] Due to their influence, Kurita's designs were once claimed to be the first cellular emoji;[22] however, Kurita has denied that this is the case.[31][32] According to interviews, he took inspiration from Japanesemanga where characters are often drawn with symbolic representations calledmanpu (such as a water drop on a face representing nervousness or confusion), and weather pictograms used to depict the weather conditions at any given time. He also drew inspiration fromChinese characters and street sign pictograms.[30][33][34] The DoCoMo i-Mode set included facial expressions, such as smiley faces, derived from a Japanese visual style commonly found in manga andanime, combined withkaomoji and smiley elements.[35] Kurita's work is displayed in theMuseum of Modern Art inNew York City.[36]
Kurita's emoji were brightly colored, albeit with a single color perglyph. General-use emoji, such as sports, actions, and weather, can readily be traced back to Kurita's emoji set.[37] Notably absent from the set were pictograms that demonstrated emotion. The yellow-faced emoji in current use evolved from other emoticon sets and cannot be traced back to Kurita's work.[37] His set also had generic images much like theJ-Phones. Elsewhere in the 1990s,Nokia phones began including preset pictograms in its text messaging app, which they defined as "smileys and symbols".[38] A third notable emoji set was introduced by Japanese mobile phone brandau by KDDI.[22][39]
Development of emoji sets (2000–2007)
The basic 12-by-12-pixel emoji in Japan grew in popularity across various platforms over the next decade. While emoji adoption was high in Japan during this time, the competitors failed to collaborate to create a uniform set of emoji to be used across all platforms in the country.[40]
Smiley faces from DOS code page 437
TheUniversal Coded Character Set (Unicode), controlled by theUnicode Consortium andISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2, had already been established as the international standard for text representation (ISO/IEC 10646) since 1993, although variants ofShift JIS remained relatively common in Japan. Unicode included several characters which would subsequently be classified as emoji, including some from North American or Western European sources such asDOS code page 437,ITC Zapf Dingbats, or theWordPerfect Iconic Symbols set.[41][42] Unicode coverage of written characters was extended several times by new editions during the 2000s, with little interest in incorporating the Japanese cellular emoji sets (deemed out of scope),[43] although symbol characters which would subsequently be classified as emoji continued to be added. For example, Unicode 4.0 contained 16 new emoji, which included direction arrows, a warning triangle, and an eject button.[44] Besides Zapf Dingbats, otherdingbat fonts such as Wingdings or Webdings also included additional pictographic symbols in their own custom pi font encodings; unlike Zapf Dingbats, however, many of these would not be available as Unicode emoji until 2014.[45]
Nicolas Loufrani applied to theUS Copyright Office in 1999 to register the 471 smileys that he created.[46] Soon after he created The Smiley Dictionary, which not only hosted the largest number of smileys at the time, it also categorized them.[47] The desktop platform was aimed at allowing people to insert smileys as text when sending emails and writing on adesktop computer.[48] By 2003, it had grown to 887 smileys and 640 ascii emotions.[49]
The smiley toolbar offered a variety of symbols and smileys and was used on platforms such asMSN Messenger.[50]Nokia, then one of the largest global telecom companies, was still referring to today's emoji sets assmileys in 2001.[51] The digital smiley movement was headed up by Nicolas Loufrani, the CEO ofThe Smiley Company.[48] He created a smiley toolbar, which was available at smileydictionary.com during the early 2000s to be sent as emoji.[52] Over the next two years, The Smiley Dictionary became the plug-in of choice for forums andonline instant messaging platforms. There were competitors, but The Smiley Dictionary was the most popular. Platforms such asMSN Messenger allowed for customisation from 2001 onwards, with many users importing emoticons to use in messages as text. These emoticons would eventually go on to become the modern-day emoji. It was not untilMSN Messenger andBlackBerry noticed the popularity of these unofficial sets and launched their own from late 2003 onwards.[53]
Beginnings of Unicode emoji (2007–2014)
Emoji being added to atext message, 2013An early use of the heart symbol as part of an English language sentence in theI Love New York advertising campaign of 1977
The first American company to take notice of emoji wasGoogle beginning in 2007. In August 2007, a team made up ofMark Davis and his colleagues Kat Momoi and Markus Scherer began petitioning theUnicode Technical Committee (UTC) in an attempt to standardise the emoji.[54] The UTC, having previously deemed emoji to be out of scope for Unicode, made the decision to broaden its scope to enable compatibility with the Japanese cellular carrier formats which were becoming more widespread.[43] Peter Edberg and Yasuo Kida joined the collaborative effort fromApple Inc. shortly after, and their official UTC proposal came in January 2009 with 625 new emoji characters. Unicode accepted the proposal in 2010.[54]
Pending the assignment of standard Unicodecode points, Google and Apple implemented emoji support viaPrivate Use Area schemes. Google first introduced emoji inGmail in October 2008, in collaboration withau by KDDI,[39] and Apple introduced the first release ofApple Color Emoji toiPhone OS on 21 November 2008.[55] Initially, Apple's emoji support was implemented for holders of a SoftBank SIM card; the emoji themselves were represented using SoftBank's Private Use Area scheme and mostly resembled the SoftBank designs.[56] Gmail emoji used their own Private Use Area scheme in asupplementary Private Use plane.[57][58]
Separately, a proposal had been submitted in 2008 to add theARIB extended characters used in broadcasting in Japan to Unicode. This included several pictographic symbols.[59] These were added in Unicode 5.2 in 2009, a year before the cellular emoji sets were fully added; they include several characters which either also appeared amongst the cellular emoji[57] or were subsequently classified as emoji.[60]
After iPhone users in the United States discovered that downloading Japaneseapps allowed access to the keyboard, pressure grew to expand the availability of the emoji keyboard beyond Japan.[61] The Emoji application for iOS, which altered the Settings app to allow access to the emoji keyboard, was created byJosh Gare in February 2010.[62] Before the existence of Gare's Emoji app,Apple had intended for the emoji keyboard to only be available inJapan iniOS version 2.2.[63]
Throughout 2009, members of theUnicode Consortium and national standardization bodies of various countries gave feedback and proposed changes to the international standardization of the emoji. The feedback from various bodies in the United States, Europe, and Japan agreed on a set of 722 emoji as the standard set. This would be released in October 2010 in Unicode 6.0.[64] Apple made the emoji keyboard available to those outside of Japan in iOS version 5.0 in 2011.[65] Later, Unicode 7.0 (June 2014) added thecharacter repertoires of theWebdings andWingdings fonts to Unicode, resulting in approximately 250 more Unicode emoji.[45]
The Unicode emoji whosecode points were assigned in 2014 or earlier are therefore taken from several sources. A single character could exist in multiple sources, and characters from a source were unified with existing characters where appropriate: for example, the "shower" weather symbol (☔️) from the ARIB source was unified with an existing umbrella with raindrops character,[66] which had been added forKPS 9566 compatibility.[67] The emoji characters named "Rain" ("雨",ame) from all three Japanese carriers were in turn unified with the ARIB character.[57] However, the Unicode Consortium groups the most significant sources of emoji into four categories:[68]
In late 2014, a Public Review Issue was created by theUnicode Technical Committee, seeking feedback on a proposed Unicode Technical Report (UTR) titled "Unicode Emoji". This was intended to improve interoperability of emoji between vendors, and define a means of supporting multiple skin tones. The feedback period closed in January 2015.[73] Also in January 2015, the use of thezero-width joiner to indicate that a sequence of emoji could be shown as a single equivalent glyph (analogous to aligature) as a means of implementing emoji without atomic code points, such as varied compositions of families, was discussed within the "emoji ad-hoc committee".[74]
Unicode 8.0 (June 2015) added another 41 emoji, including articles of sports equipment such as the cricket bat, food items such as thetaco, new facial expressions, and symbols for places of worship, as well as five characters (crab, scorpion, lion face, bow and arrow, amphora) to improve support for pictorial rather than symbolic representations of the signs of theZodiac.[b][76]
Also in June 2015, the first approved version ("Emoji 1.0") of the Unicode Emoji report was published as Unicode Technical Report #51 (UTR #51). This introduced the mechanism of skin tone indicators, the first official recommendations about which Unicode characters were to be considered emoji, and the first official recommendations about which characters were to be displayed in an emoji font in the absence of avariation selector, and listed the zero-width joiner sequences for families and couples that were implemented by existing vendors.[77] Maintenance of UTR #51, taking emoji requests, and creating proposals for emoji characters and emoji mechanisms was made the responsibility of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee (ESC), operating as a subcommittee of the Unicode Technical Committee.[78][79]
With the release of version 5.0 in May 2017 alongside Unicode 10.0, UTR #51 was redesignated a Unicode Technical Standard (UTS #51), making it an independent specification.[80] As of July 2017,[update] there were 2,666 Unicode emoji listed.[81] The next version of UTS #51 (published in May 2018) skipped to the version number Emoji 11.0 so as to synchronise its major version number with the corresponding version of the Unicode Standard.[82]The popularity of emoji has caused pressure from vendors and international markets to add additional designs into the Unicode standard to meet the demands of different cultures. Some characters now defined as emoji are inherited from a variety of pre-Unicode messenger systems not only used in Japan, includingYahoo andMSN Messenger.[83] Corporate demand for emoji standardization has placed pressures on the Unicode Consortium, with some members complaining that it had overtaken the group's traditional focus on standardizing characters used for minority languages and transcribing historical records.[84] Conversely, the Consortium thought that public desire for emoji support has put pressure on vendors to improve their Unicode support,[85] which is especially true for characters outside theBasic Multilingual Plane,[86] thus leading to better support for Unicode's historic and minority scripts in deployed software.[85]
In 2022, the Unicode Consortium decided to stop accepting proposals for flag emoji, citing low use of the category and that adding new flags "creates exclusivity at the expense of others".[87][88] The Consortium stated that new flag emoji would still be added when their country becomes part of theISO 3166-1 standard, with no proposal needed.[87][88]
Oxford Dictionaries namedU+1F602😂FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY[89] its 2015Word of the Year.[90] Oxford noted that 2015 had seen a sizable increase in the use of the word "emoji" and recognized its impact on popular culture.[90] Oxford Dictionaries President Caspar Grathwohl expressed that "traditional alphabet scripts have been struggling to meet the rapid-fire, visually focused demands of 21st Century communication. It's not surprising that a pictographic script like emoji has stepped in to fill those gaps — it's flexible, immediate, and infuses tone beautifully."[91]SwiftKey found that "Face with Tears of Joy" was the most popular emoji across the world.[92] TheAmerican Dialect Society declaredU+1F346🍆AUBERGINE to be the "Most Notable Emoji" of 2015 in their Word of the Year vote.[93]
Some emoji are specific to Japanese culture, such as abowing businessman (U+1F647🙇PERSON BOWING DEEPLY), theshoshinsha mark used to indicate a beginner driver (U+1F530🔰JAPANESE SYMBOL FOR BEGINNER), a white flower (U+1F4AE💮WHITE FLOWER) used to denote "brilliant homework",[94] or a group of emoji representing popular foods:ramen noodles (U+1F35C🍜STEAMING BOWL),dango (U+1F361🍡DANGO),onigiri (U+1F359🍙RICE BALL),curry (U+1F35B🍛CURRY AND RICE), andsushi (U+1F363🍣SUSHI).Unicode Consortium founderMark Davis compared the use of emoji to a developing language, particularly mentioning the American use ofeggplant (U+1F346🍆AUBERGINE) to represent aphallus.[95] Somelinguists have classified emoji andemoticons asdiscourse markers.[96]
A variety of emoji as they appear on Google's Noto Color Emoji set as of 2024
In December 2015, asentiment analysis of emoji was published,[97] and the Emoji Sentiment Ranking 1.0[98] was provided. In 2016, a musical about emoji premiered in Los Angeles.[99][100] The animatedThe Emoji Movie was released in summer 2017.[101][102]
In January 2017, in what is believed to be the first large-scale study of emoji usage, researchers at theUniversity of Michigan analyzed over 1.2 billion messages input via the Kika Emoji Keyboard[103] and announced that the Face With Tears of Joy was the most popular emoji. The Heart and theHeart eyes emoji stood second and third, respectively. The study also found that the French use heart emoji the most.[104] People in countries like Australia, France, and the Czech Republic used more happy emoji, while this was not so for people in Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina, where people used more negative emoji in comparison to cultural hubs known for restraint and self-discipline, like Turkey, France, and Russia.[105]
There has been discussion among legal experts on whether or not emoji could be admissible as evidence in court trials.[106][107] Furthermore, as emoji continue to develop and grow as a "language" of symbols, there may also be the potential of the formation of emoji "dialects".[108] Emoji are being used as more than just to show reactions and emotions.[109]Snapchat has even incorporated emoji in its trophy and friends system with each emoji showing a complex meaning.[110] Emoji can also convey different meanings based on syntax and inversion. For instance, 'fairy comments' involve heart, star, and fairy emoji placed between the words of a sentence. These comments often invert the meanings associated with hearts and may be used to 'tread on borders of offense.'[111]
Sample emoji probability distributions generated by the DeepMoji model
On March 5, 2019,[117] a drop ofblood (U+1FA78🩸DROP OF BLOOD) emoji was released, which is intended to help break the stigma ofmenstruation.[118] In addition to normalizingperiods, it will also be relevant to describe medical topics such asdonating blood and other blood-related activities.[118]
Linguistically, emoji are used to indicate emotional state; they tend to be used more in positive communication. Some researchers believe emoji can be used forvisual rhetoric. Emoji can be used to set emotional tone in messages. Emoji tend not to have their own meaning but act as aparalanguage, adding meaning to text. Emoji can add clarity and credibility to text.[120]
Sociolinguistically, the use of emoji differs depending on speaker and setting. Women use emoji more than men. Men use a wider variety of emoji. Women are more likely to use emoji in public communication than in private communication.Extraversion andagreeableness are positively correlated with emoji use;neuroticism is negatively correlated. Emoji use differs between cultures: studies in terms ofHofstede's cultural dimensions theory found that cultures with high power distance and tolerance to indulgence used more negative emoji, while those with high uncertainty avoidance, individualism, and long-term orientation use more positive emoji.[120] A 6-countryuser experience study showed that emoji-based scales (specifically the usage ofsmileys) may ease the challenges related totranslation and implementation for brief cross-cultural surveys.[121]
As emoji act as a paralanguage this causes a unique pattern to be seen in the bigrams, trigrams, and quadrigrams of emoji. A study conducted by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne showed that the most common bigrams, trigrams, and quadrigrams of emoji are those that repeat the same emoji.[122] Unlike other languages emoji frequently are repeated one after another, while in languages, such as English, it is rare to see words repeated after one another.[122] An example of this is that a common bigram for emoji is two crying laughing emoji. Rather than being a repeated word or phrase the use of emoji after one another typically represents an emphasize of the displayed emoji's meaning instead.[122] So, one crying laughing emoji means something is funny, two represent it's really funny, three might represent it's incredibly funny, and so forth.
Research has shown that emoji are often misunderstood. In some cases, this misunderstanding is related to how the actual emoji design is interpreted by the viewer;[123] in other cases, the emoji that was sent is not shown in the same way on the receiving side.[124]
The first issue relates to the cultural or contextual interpretation of the emoji. When the author picks an emoji, they think about it in a certain way, but the same character may not trigger the same thoughts in the mind of the receiver.[125] For example, people in China have developed a system for using emoji subversively so that a smiley face could be sent to convey a despising, mocking, and obnoxious attitude, as theorbicularis oculi (the muscle near that upper eye corner) on the face of the emoji does not move, and theorbicularis oris (the one near the mouth) tightens, which is believed to be a sign of suppressing a smile.[126]
The second problem relates to encodes. When an author of a message picks an emoji from a list, it is normally encoded in a non-graphical manner during the transmission, and if the author and the reader do not use the same software or operating system for their devices, the reader's device may visualize the same emoji in a different way. As an example, in April 2020, British actress and presenterJameela Jamil posted a tweet from her iPhone using the Face with Hand Over Mouth emoji (🤭) as part of a comment on people shopping for food during theCOVID-19 pandemic. On Apple'siOS, the emoji expression was neutral and pensive, but on other platforms the emoji shows as a giggling face. Some fans thought that she was mocking poor people, but this was not her intended meaning.[127]
Researchers from the German Studies Institute atRuhr-Universität Bochum found that most people can easily understand an emoji when it replaces a word directly – like an icon for a rose instead of the word 'rose' – yet it takes people about 50 percent longer to comprehend the emoji.[128]
Variation and ambiguity
Emoji characters vary slightly between platforms within the limits in meaning defined by the Unicode specification, as companies have tried to provide artistic presentations of ideas and objects.[129] For example, following an Apple tradition, the calendar emoji on Apple products always shows July 17, the date in 2002 Apple announced itsiCal calendar application formacOS. This led some Apple product users to initially nickname July 17 "World Emoji Day".[130] Other emoji fonts show different dates or do not show a specific one.[131]
Some Apple emoji are very similar to the SoftBank standard, since SoftBank was the first Japanese network on which the iPhone launched. For example,U+1F483💃DANCER is female on Apple and SoftBank standards but male or gender-neutral on others.[132]
Journalists have noted that the ambiguity of emoji has allowed them to take on culture-specific meanings not present in the originalglyphs. For example,U+1F485💅NAIL POLISH has been described as being used in English-language communities to signify "non-caring fabulousness"[133] and "anything from shuttinghaters down to a sense of accomplishment".[134][135] Unicode manuals sometimes provide notes on auxiliary meanings of an object to guide designers on how emoji may be used, for example noting that some users may expectU+1F4BA💺SEAT to stand for "a reserved or ticketed seat, as for an airplane, train, or theater".[136]
Controversial emoji
Evolution of the pistol emoji as rendered by stockAndroid systems. From left to right: Jelly Bean (pistol), KitKat (blunderbuss), Lollipop (revolver), Oreo (revolver) and Pie (water gun).
Some emoji have been involved in controversy due to their perceived meanings. Multiple arrests and imprisonments have followed the usage of pistol (U+1F52B🔫PISTOL), knife (U+1F5E1🗡DAGGER KNIFE), and bomb (U+1F4A3💣BOMB) emoji in ways that authorities deemed credible threats.[137]
In the lead-up to the2016 Summer Olympics, the Unicode Consortium considered proposals to add several Olympic-related emoji, including medals and events such ashandball andwater polo.[138] By October 2015, these candidate emoji included "rifle" (U+1F946🥆RIFLE) and "modern pentathlon" (U+1F93B🤻MODERN PENTATHLON).[139][140] However, in 2016, Apple and Microsoft opposed these two emoji, and the characters were added without emoji presentations, meaning that software is expected to render them in black-and-white rather than color, and emoji-specific software such as onscreen keyboards will generally not include them. In addition, while the original incarnations of the modern pentathlon emoji depicted its five events, including a man pointing a gun, the final glyph contains a person riding a horse, along with a laser pistol target in the corner.[137][140][141]
On August 1, 2016,Apple announced that iniOS 10, thepistol emoji (U+1F52B🔫PISTOL) would be changed from a realisticrevolver to awater pistol.[137] Conversely, the following day, Microsoft pushed out an update toWindows 10 that changed its longstanding depiction of the pistol emoji as a toyraygun to a real revolver.[142] Microsoft stated that the change was made to bring the glyph more in line with industry-standard designs and customer expectations.[142] By 2018, most major platforms such as Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Facebook, and Twitter had transitioned their rendering of the pistol emoji to match Apple's water gun implementation.[143] Apple's change of depiction from a realistic gun to a toy gun was criticised by, among others, the editor ofEmojipedia, because it could lead to messages appearing differently to the receiver than the sender had intended.[144]Insider's Rob Price said it created the potential for "serious miscommunication across different platforms", and asked, "What if a joke sent from an Apple user to a Google user is misconstrued because of differences in rendering? Or if a genuine threat sent by a Google user to an Apple user goes unreported because it is taken as a joke?"[145]
Theeggplant (aubergine) emoji (U+1F346🍆AUBERGINE) has also seen controversy due to it being used to represent apenis.[93][95][146][147] Beginning in December 2014, thehashtag#EggplantFridays began to rise to popularity onInstagram for use in marking photos featuring clothed or unclothed penises.[146][147] This became such a popular trend that, beginning in April 2015, Instagram disabled the ability to search for not only the#EggplantFridays tag, but also other eggplant-containing hashtags, including simply#eggplant and#🍆.[146][147][148]
Thepeach emoji (U+1F351🍑PEACH) has likewise been used as a euphemistic icon forbuttocks, with a 2016Emojipedia analysis revealing that only seven percent of English languagetweets with the peach emoji refer to the actual fruit.[149][150][151] In 2016,Apple attempted to redesign the emoji to less resemble buttocks. This was met with fierce backlash in beta testing, and Apple reversed its decision by the time it went live to the public.[152]
In December 2017, a lawyer inDelhi,India, threatened to file a lawsuit againstWhatsApp for allowing use of themiddle finger emoji (U+1F595🖕REVERSED HAND WITH MIDDLE FINGER EXTENDED) on the basis that the company is "directly abetting the use of an offensive,lewd, obscene gesture" in violation of theIndian Penal Code.[153]
Various, often incompatible, character encoding schemes were developed by the different mobile providers in Japan for their own emoji sets.[57][71] For example, the extendedShift JIS representation F797 is used for aconvenience store (🏪) by SoftBank, but for awristwatch (⌚️) by KDDI.[71][57] All three vendors also developed schemes for encoding their emoji in the UnicodePrivate Use Area: DoCoMo, for example, used the range U+E63E through U+E757.[57] Versions ofiOS prior to 5.1 encoded emoji in the SoftBank private use area.[154][155]
Unicode support considerations
Most, but not all, emoji are included in theSupplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP) of Unicode, which is also used for ancient scripts, some modern scripts such asAdlam orOsage, and special-use characters such asMathematical Alphanumeric Symbols.[156] Some systems introduced prior to the advent of Unicode emoji were only designed to support characters in theBasic Multilingual Plane (BMP) on the assumption that non-BMP characters would rarely be encountered,[86] although failure to properly handle characters outside of the BMP precludes Unicode compliance.[157]
The introduction of Unicode emoji created an incentive for vendors to improve their support for non-BMP characters.[86] The Unicode Consortium notes that "[b]ecause of the demand for emoji, many implementations have upgraded their Unicode support substantially", also helping support minority languages that use those features.[85]
Color support
Any operating system that supports adding additional fonts to the system can add an emoji-supporting font. However, inclusion of colorful emoji in existing font formats requires dedicated support for colorglyphs. Not all operating systems have support for color fonts, so, emoji might have to be rendered as black-and-white line art or not at all. There are four different formats used for multi-color glyphs in anSFNT font,[158] not all of which are necessarily supported by a given operating system library or software package such as a web browser or graphical program.[159]
Implementation by different platforms and vendors
Apple first introduced emoji to their desktop operating system with the release ofOS X 10.7 Lion, in 2011. Users can view emoji characters sent through email and messaging applications, which are commonly shared by mobile users, as well as any other application. Users can create emoji symbols using the "Characters" special input panel from almost any native application by selecting the "Edit" menu and pulling down to "Special Characters", or by the key combination⌘ Command+⌥ Option+T. The emoji keyboard was first available in Japan with the release ofiPhone OS version 2.2 in 2008.[160] The emoji keyboard was not officially made available outside of Japan untiliOS version 5.0.[161] From iPhone OS 2.2 through to iOS 4.3.5 (2011), those outside Japan could access the keyboard but had to use a third-party app to enable it. Apple has revealed that the "face with tears of joy" is the most popular emoji among English-speaking Americans. On second place is the "heart" emoji, followed by the "Loudly Crying Face".[162][better source needed]
An update forWindows 7 andWindows Server 2008 R2 brought a subset of the monochrome Unicode set to those operating systems as part of theSegoe UI Symbol font.[163] As ofWindows 8.1 Preview, theSegoe UI Emoji font is included, which supplies full-color pictographs. The plain Segoe UI font lacks emoji characters, whereas Segoe UI Symbol and Segoe UI Emoji include them. Emoji characters can be accessed through the onscreen keyboard's😀 key or through the physical keyboard shortcut⊞ Win+..
In 2016,Firefox 50 added in-browser emoji rendering for platforms lacking in native support.[164]
Facebook andTwitter replace all Unicode emoji used on their websites with their own custom graphics. Prior to October 2017, Facebook had different sets for the main site and for itsMessenger service, where only the former provides complete coverage. Messenger now uses Apple emoji on iOS, and the main Facebook set elsewhere.[165]Facebook reactions are only partially compatible with standard emoji.[166]
Modifiers
Emoji versus text presentation
Unicode definesvariation sequences for many of its emoji to indicate their desired presentation.
Emoji characters can have two main kinds of presentation:
anemoji presentation, with colorful and perhaps whimsical shapes, even animated
Specifying the desired presentation is done by following the base emoji with either U+FE0E VARIATION SELECTOR-15 (VS15) for text or U+FE0F VARIATION SELECTOR-16 (VS16) for emoji-style.[167] As of version 16.0 (2024), Unicode defines presentation sequences for 371 characters.[168] However, theUnicode Technical Committee has since determined that unifying colourful emoji characters with textual symbols and dingbats was a "mistake", and resolved to allocate newcode points rather than defining new presentation sequences.[169]
Five symbol modifier characters were added with Unicode 8.0 to provide a range of skin tones for human emoji. These modifiers are calledEMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-1-2,-3,-4,-5, and-6 (U+1F3FB–U+1F3FF): [🏻 🏼 🏽 🏾 🏿]Error: {{Lang}}: Latn text/non-Latn script subtag mismatch (help). They are based on theFitzpatrick scale for classifying human skin color. Human emoji that are not followed by one of these five modifiers should be displayed in a generic, non-realistic skin tone, such as bright yellow (■), blue (■), or gray (■).[68] Non-human emoji (likeU+26FD⛽FUEL PUMP) are unaffected by the Fitzpatrick modifiers.[170] As of Unicode version 16.0, Fitzpatrick modifiers can be used with 131 human emoji spread across seven blocks:Dingbats,Emoticons,Miscellaneous Symbols,Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs,Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs,Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A, andTransport and Map Symbols.[171]
The following table shows both the Unicode characters and the open-source "Twemoji" images, designed byTwitter:
Sample use of Fitzpatrick modifiers
Code point
Name
Type shown
Default
Fitzpatrick type
1–2
3
4
5
6
U+1F9D2
Child
Text
🧒
🧒🏻
🧒🏼
🧒🏽
🧒🏾
🧒🏿
Twemoji image
U+1F466
Boy
Text
👦
👦🏻
👦🏼
👦🏽
👦🏾
👦🏿
Twemoji image
U+1F467
Girl
Text
👧
👧🏻
👧🏼
👧🏽
👧🏾
👧🏿
Twemoji image
U+1F9D1
Adult
Text
🧑
🧑🏻
🧑🏼
🧑🏽
🧑🏾
🧑🏿
Twemoji image
U+1F468
Man
Text
👨
👨🏻
👨🏼
👨🏽
👨🏾
👨🏿
Twemoji image
U+1F469
Woman
Text
👩
👩🏻
👩🏼
👩🏽
👩🏾
👩🏿
Twemoji image
Joining
Behaviour of theZWJ andZWNJ format controls with various types of character, including emoji
Implementations may use azero-width joiner (ZWJ) between multiple emoji to make them behave like a single, unique emoji character.[68] For example, the sequenceU+1F468👨MAN,U+200DZERO WIDTH JOINER,U+1F469👩WOMAN,U+200DZERO WIDTH JOINER,U+1F467👧GIRL (👨👩👧) could be displayed as a single emoji depicting a family with a man, a woman, and a girl if the implementation supports it. Systems that do not support it would ignore the ZWJs, displaying only the three base emoji in order (👨👩👧).
Unicode previously maintained a catalog of emoji ZWJ sequences that were supported on at least one commonly available platform. The consortium has since switched to documenting sequences that arerecommended for general interchange (RGI). These are clusters that emoji fonts are expected to include as part of the standard.[172]
The ZWJ has also been used to implement platform-specific emoji. For example, in 2016, Microsoft released a series of Ninja Cat emoji for theirWindows 10 Anniversary Update. The sequenceU+1F431🐱CAT FACE,U+200DZERO WIDTH JOINER,U+1F464👤BUST IN SILHOUETTE was used to create Ninja Cat (🐱👤).[c][173] Ninja Cat and variants were removed in late 2021'sFluent emoji redesign.[174]
Unicode 16.0 specifies a total of 3,790 emoji using 1,431 characters spread across 24 blocks, of which 26 areRegional indicator symbols that combine in pairs to form flag emoji, and 12 (#, * and 0–9) are base characters forkeycap emoji sequences.[175][171][68]
The 2009 filmMoon featured a robot named GERTY who communicates using a neutral-toned synthesized voice together with a screen showing emoji representing the corresponding emotional content.[176]
A musical calledEmojiland premiered at Rockwell Table & Stage in Los Angeles in May 2016[99][100] after selected songs were presented at the same venue in 2015.[179][180]
In October 2016, theMuseum of Modern Art acquired the original collection of emoji distributed by NTT DoCoMo in 1999.[181]
In November 2016, the first emoji-themed convention, Emojicon, was held in San Francisco.[182]
In April 2017, theDoctor Who episode "Smile" featured nanobots called Vardy, which communicate through robotic avatars that use emoji (without any accompanying speech output) and are sometimes referred to by the time travelers as "Emojibots".[184]
On September 3, 2021,Drake released his sixth studioalbum,Certified Lover Boy. The album's cover art features twelve emoji of pregnant women in varyingclothing colors, hair colors, and skin tones.[186][187]
^Also has ARIB (ARIB SJIS 0xEECE)[70] and JCarrier (SoftBank SJIS 0xF7DA, au SJIS 0xF74A)[71] sources.
^Olderau by KDDI devices had used pictorial representations of all zodiac signs, displaying for instance thepisces sign (♓️) as a fish (🐟). Later devices had changed these to symbols, for consistency with other vendors.[75]
^Five other Ninja Cat emoji were released: Stunt Cat (🐱🏍), Hacker Cat (🐱💻), Dino Cat (🐱🐉), Hipster Cat (🐱👓) and Astro Cat (🐱🚀).
^Taggart, Caroline (November 5, 2015).New Words for Old: Recycling Our Language for the Modern World. Michael O'Mara Books.ISBN9781782434733. RetrievedOctober 25, 2017 – via Google Books.Hard on the heels of the emoticon comes the Japanese-bornemoji, also aDIGITAL icon used to express emotion, but more sophisticated in terms of imagery than those that are created by pressing a colon followed by a parenthesis.Emoji is made up of the Japanese forpicture (e) andcharacter (moji), so its resemblance to emotion and emoticon is a particularly happy coincidence.
^Kalantzis, Mary; Cope, Bill (2020).Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge University Press. p. 33.ISBN978-1-108-49534-9.
^abcdSuignard, Michel (November 6, 2012)."Status of encoding of Wingdings and Webdings Symbols"(PDF).ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 2 N4384,UTCL2/12-368. (For display consistent with the other source encodings, the prefix digits denoting the specific WDings font have been removed, and the numbers have been converted to hexadecimal.)
^Felbo, Bjarke (2017). "Using millions of emoji occurrences to learn any-domain representations for detecting sentiment, emotion and sarcasm".Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. pp. 1615–1625.arXiv:1708.00524.doi:10.18653/v1/D17-1169.S2CID2493033.
^"👍 Facebook Emoji List — Emojis and Reacts for Facebook".Emojipedia. RetrievedFebruary 7, 2022.Facebook provides animated "emoji" reactions to posts. Reactions do not correspond to specific emoji in the Unicode standard (...). In March 2020, Facebook added aCare emoji reaction as an additional option in response to COVID-19. This is displayed similarly to a hugging face holding a red love heart. ThisCare emoji is not available as a standardized Unicode emoji, and can only be used in reactions to Facebook posts.
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