How Emojis Were Invented
The word emoji comes from the Japanese 絵 (“e,” picture), 文 (“mo,” write), and 字 (“ji,” character).
Japanese characters, or “kanji,” are largely based on Chinese ideograms, whose writing system is already highly pictorial. The fact that “emoji” sounds like it was developed from the English word “emotion” is a coincidence.
Origin of emojis
A distant relative of emojis is hieroglyphics, which were drawings used by the ancient Egyptians to preserve their histories and tales.
Modern emojis can be roughly linked to chatrooms from the 1990s when they were first used to indicate smiles, show emotions or highlight jokes. Emoji used to be like 🙂 :D:’ before they became pixelated and colored.
But it is Shigetaka Kurita, a Japanese designer, who is credited with creating the modern emoji. Kurita had to work inside a grid that was 12 by 12 pixels when he made the first emoji in 1999.
A collection of 176 emojis for cell phones and pagers was produced in 1999 by the Japanese cell phone company NTT DOCOMO. To construct the first emoji library, Kurita employed Japanese graphic novels, the Zapf Dingbats typeface, pictures, and pictograms.
Emojis make you more expressive when texting. Emojipedia reports that the ‘face with tears of joy’ is the most widely used emoji on Twitter. Additionally, the usage of emojis has shown significant growth on the platform, with one in every five tweets now incorporating an emoji, a significant increase from one in every ten tweets in 2014.
Every day, Facebook Messenger receives more than 900 million emoji messages (without text). Emojis appear in about 50% of Instagram comments. Remote workforces are using personalized emojis in the Slack messaging app. This all shows how important and popular emojis are. The online world without this great invention will certainly be drab and emotionless.