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Wall Street Journal

‘Face With Tears of Joy' Review: Smartphone Hieroglyphics

'Emoji Dick,' a line-by-line translation into emoji of Herman Melville's 1851 novel, 'Moby-Dick,' was published in 2010. Five years later, the Oxford English Dictionary chose the 'face with tears of joy' emoji as its word of the year. Today there are north of 3,500 accepted emoji characters, many of which have become inescapable in digital communication. Is this increasingly widespread visual lexicon a language of its own? Linguists and language pedants generally say no. In 'Face With Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji,' Keith Houston, weighing the evidence, concurs. He asserts, however, that there is 'a richness of emoji usage that rivals any language.' That, too, might rankle the pedants, but the author, an emoji aficionado, mounts an energetic case. Mr. Houston opens with a brisk history that identifies distant ancestors of the emojis you find on your phone, forebears that can include symbols found on ancient scrolls and 18th-century Buddhist texts. The term 'emoji' derives from combining the Japanese words for 'picture' and 'written character.' Shigetaka Kurita, a software engineer, is often credited with creating the first set of emojis, which the Japanese cellular provider Docomo launched in 1999, but researchers have found emoji-like characters, including precursors to today's familiar smiley faces and hearts, on Japanese word processors dating back to the 1980s. An emoji relative, the emoticon, which combines keyboard characters to make simple pictorial symbols, first appeared in 1982: A Carnegie Mellon computer scientist proposed to colleagues on an electronic bulletin board that they type three punctuation marks in sequence— ':-)'—to indicate when they were being facetious. Google and Apple helped the system go global with smartphone operating systems that used emojis liberally. Doing so required the support of the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit organization that ensures that digitized characters and symbols are compatible across networks and devices.