Emoji

An emoji ( əm-OH-jee; plural emoji or emojis; Japanese: 絵文字, pronounced [emoꜜ(d)ʑi]) is a pictogram, logogram, or ideogram embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web 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 a logographic system.

The first emoji sets were created by Japanese portable electronic device companies in the late 1980s and the 1990s. The word emoji comes from Japanese e (絵; 'picture') + moji (文字; 'character') and originally meant 'pictograph'; the resemblance to the English words emotion and emoticon is purely coincidental. Emoji became increasingly popular worldwide in the 2010s after Unicode began encoding emoji into the Unicode Standard. They are now considered to be a large part of popular culture in the West and around the world. In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries named the emoji U+1F602 😂 FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY its word of the year.

History

Predecessors

The emoji was predated by the emoticon, a concept implemented in 1982 by computer scientist Scott Fahlman when he suggested text-based symbols such as :-) and :-( could be used to replace language. Theories about language replacement can be traced back to the 1960s, when Russian novelist and professor Vladimir Nabokov stated in an interview with The 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." It did not become a mainstream concept until the 1990s, when Japanese, American, and European companies began developing Fahlman's idea. Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope point out that similar symbology was incorporated by Bruce Parello, a student at the University of Illinois, into PLATO IV, the first e-learning system, in 1972.