The Origin of Emojis to Learn about

It is hard to imagine our everyday life without emojis, right? The majority of us send them to each other within the process of communication. By the way, they are widely used in all kinds of messengers and social networks. Take a look at this article if you want to find out where they came from and what history lies behind all of this.

Are Emojis and Emoticons the Same Thing?

Not really so. Emojis are more complex compared to emoticons. The first ones represent the images and symbols while the emoticons are just faces and expressions that are created by means of the keyboard characters. So, this is an emoticon :)

The father of emoticons is Scott Fahlman. He invented them about thirty years ago. His attitude to emojis is not very positive and this is absolutely understandable. He came up with something he values a lot, so it is not even surprising at all.

The Country That Presented Emojis to the World

It is Japan. Actually, the name of the matter that is being discussed in this article supposes it. the roots of this may be found in the fact that at the end of the 20th century the Japanese people really fell in love with using images in their mobile phone communication.

So, one of the NTT DoCoMo employees, whose name is Shigetaka Kurita, introduced emojis for the first time, and he can be considered the father of the phenomenon. He thought that the communication the Japanese have to deal with on a regular basis is deprived of the emotional component. Accordingly, he decided to do something about it!

The meaning of the word emoji is as follows: it is the picture (e) and character (moji). So, Shigetaka Kurita had the idea that it is rather boring to see the key ideas conveyed in the text only. For instance, if there was a talk about the weather, it would be pleasant to see the image of the sun in the message. It would be relevant when a person wanted to say that the weather was fine (instead of just using this word). As long as Kurita did not experience enough support and enthusiasm towards his idea, he made a decision to start working on his project on his own. Certainly, he had a team helping him, and they came up with a set of 176 characters (12-pixel by 12-pixel ones). All of this was represented on paper first but later, the unused area of the Shift JIS Japanese character encoding was applied.

What Happened Next?

It is evident that Kurita wanted to spread his ideas further. He started to collaborate with the biggest tech companies but it took some time before they agreed to work with him.

Some competitors wanted to take the clients from Kurita’s company and started to introduce better emojis that were more detailed. But all of this led to certain chaos meaning that the emojis could not be displayed well on all the devices Japanese users had. The more or less fine solution to the issue appeared in 2005 when the carriers began to map their incoming signals to their emoji character sets.

The Role of Apple Company in Popularizing the Emojis

Apple played a great role in making emojis as popular as they are today. So, if you like the emojis, you should say thanks to these guys too!

The first iPhone was released in 2007 and at that time, it was decided to include emojis in the devices. As for the official support of the emojis, it happened in 2011 when Apple released iOS 5. In five years, the spreading of emojis could be called just incredible.

As you may guess, after Apple included emojis in their gadgets, the same was done by Android from Google. And, they are widely used in today’s devices of this type too.

What about the Unicode Standard and Emojis Interconnection?

People would not use emojis that much today if there was no Unicode Standard. This is a computing industry standard that is responsible for handling and encoding the text expressed in most of the writing systems of the world.

In other words, the Unicode standard made it real to send a message that contains emojis from a user in one part of the world to a person in another (like from the US to Asia). It is great that it is real as long as otherwise, we would still have issues with displaying the emojis (just like it was in the very beginning in Japan). So, as you see, the standardization turned out to be really advantageous here!

In What Way Were the Emojis Updated?

So, let’s take a look at what exactly the development of emojis looked like throughout the years.

1. It is the year 2012. A gay and lesbian couple appears in the set of characters presented by Apple. Soon, they started to hold hands.
2. 2013 The emojis became a part of the official Google keyboard app which made it possible to use them no matter what Android device the person had. Picking favorite emojis that could be added to the text message was an easy matter then.
3. The year 2014. There was a big step in the development of emojis as long as the representatives of Apple decided that it was time to make the set of characters multicultural. African-American faces appeared in the set this year.
4. In 2015, racial diversity was expanded further, and it became possible to choose the skin tones of some of the emoji’s characters. Right? Later this year, there was a big update linked to Apple’s 9.1 version for iPhone and iPad models. So, such new characters as the writing hand, the Vulcan salute, and a middle finger appeared.
5. Gender diversity in the emojis set becomes a key goal of Apple in 2016.

As long as emojis started to be popular worldwide only in 2011, they are still thought to be a new phenomenon. And the forecast is as follows: the emojis will continue to grow in number throughout the years because the users just love them!