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The Citizen
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Citizen
It's World Emoji Today😂: The Power of Emojis
📅 Every year on July 17th, the world pauses for a moment, not to draft long texts or write eloquent messages, but to drop a little emoji that says it all. World Emoji Day celebrates the faces that speak louder than words It's World Emoji Day, and the tiny icons that once seemed like digital doodles are now a global language of laughter, love, and everything in between. 🌍 The emoji-volution Believe it or not, emojis are younger than most millennials' cellphone contracts. It all started in Japan in 1999 when Shigetaka Kurita created the very first emoji set, a modest 176 pictograms for a mobile internet platform. These weren't just cute icons; they were designed to convey emotional context where plain text fell flat. Shigetaka Kurita. Picture: Instagram However, emojis went global in 2011 when Apple introduced the emoji keyboard to iOS, closely followed by Android devices. Suddenly, we had an arsenal of facial expressions, food items, zodiac signs, and strangely specific modes of transportation (why is there a canoe and a gondola?) to pepper our messages with. 📆 Why July 17th? Jeremy Burge Emoji. Picture: Instagram Look closely at the calendar emoji 📅 and you'll notice something curious: the date displayed is July 17. That's because it marks the launch of Apple's iCal calendar app in 2002. When Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge noticed this, he declared July 17 as World Emoji Day back in 2014, and the internet ran with it. Today, World Emoji Day is a real thing. Brands use it to drop campaigns, social media goes wild, and sometimes even new emojis are announced. Yes, it's a whole thing now, because why not? ALSO READ:New button-based smartphone for the visually impaired launched in South Africa 😂 The emoji GOAT So, which emoji rules them all? According to Unicode Consortium (yes, the emoji overlords are real), the face with tears of joy 😂 consistently tops the list as the world's most-used emoji. Why? Because the internet loves irony, chaos, and laughing through the pain. Other top contenders include the red heart ❤️, the rolling-on-the-floor-laughing 🤣, the pleading face 🥺, and the fire emoji 🔥, often used in compliments or when someone posts a selfie that melts timelines. 💬 More than just cute icons Emojis aren't just for giggles. They're shaping the way we communicate. Studies show that using emojis in messages boosts engagement and makes digital convos feel more human. There has even been academic research into the semantics of emojis. Yes, your PhD could be about whether the upside-down face means sarcasm or existential dread (spoiler: it's both). So go on, send a wink 😉, drop a confetti cannon 🎉, or passive-aggressively end your text with a thumbs up 👍. After all, it's World Emoji Day, and these tiny symbols are doing big things.
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
It's World Emoji Day: Science suggests using these tiny symbols makes you more likable
Get ready to sprinkle a few extra "zany faces" 🤪 and "fist bump" 👊 symbols into your texts -- today is World Emoji Day 🎉🎈🫶. World Emoji Day started in 2014. It's celebrated every year on July 17 because that's the date shown on the calendar emoji 📅. It's a day that celebrates how emoji help people express themselves in a quick, creative way. Emoji were invented in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita, a Japanese designer who wanted a fun and simple way to add emotion to digital messages. His original set had just 176 emoji, and they quickly caught on in Japan before spreading around the world. As of September 2024, the Unicode Standard includes 3,790 emoji. This count includes all solo emoji, skin tone and gender variants, flags, and combined sequences. And new emoji are on the way. A draft list of 164 emoji candidates is set for approval by the Unicode Consortium in September 2025, which could bring the total to 3,954 emoji once officially released. Some of the proposed icons include a leafless tree, a face with bags under the eyes, and a harp. Emoji are more than just a pretty face 💄🪞. They help add tone, emotion and personality to digital messages. A recent PLOS ONE study suggests that using emoji can make you seem more friendly and likable. People who added emoji in their texts were perceived as more responsive, which increased feelings of closeness, relationship satisfaction and likability compared to text-only messages. "The reason we have emoji is that words alone don't really convey the emotional meaning or content of what we're trying to express," Dr. Helen Riess, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and founder of Empathetics in Boston, told ABC News. "In digital texting, all of that is missing, and so there's just so much opportunity for misunderstandings." Emoji are getting smarter and more expressive too. Tech companies are experimenting with 3D and animated emoji -- see Apple's "Animoji" and Telegram's interactive emoji effects -- to bring more emotion and movement into messages. Scientists are also exploring how emoji can play a role in dialing down the temperature of online discourse and encouraging more respectful communication. For example, Google's Perspective API flags toxic language in real time and can suggest using emoji to soften the tone.
Wall Street Journal
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- 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.
BBC News
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
World Emoji Day 2025: What's the most popular emoji?
Happy, sad, silly, you probably use emoji every day messaging your mates - but did you know they are celebrated each year?July 17 is Emoji day - chosen because that is the date shown on most calendar first emoji were invented by Japanese designer Shigetaka Kurita in 1999, and have since become so popular that around 10 billion are sent every day!This year is the twelfth Emoji Day - find out more about the symbols, including the all-time most popular emojis, below. What is the most used emoji? Each emoji has to be approved by Unicode Consortium - a group who decide which new emoji characters should be 3,521 to chose from it can sometimes be hard to know which one to use, but here are the top three used most often, according to emoji experts, Emojipedia. Red heart At number one, it's the classic red heart. It shows you love someone or something, what a nice one to send! According to Emojipedia it's the most popular of all time - the "most beloved of all emojis, old or new." Loudly crying face The second most common emoji at the moment according to Emojipedia is the loud crying face. The most obvious thing it's used for is for when you're upset, but it's often used as a way of showing crying with laughter, too. What's the last thing you found so funny you cried this hard? Fire At number three is the fire emoji. If something is described as flames it means it's good, so you might be sending this if you like your friend's outfit or you're talking about a new hit single you like. Where does the word emoji come from? You may think that emoji has something to do with conveying emotion, however the similarity in the two words is entirely word is actually Japanese, combining the kanji for picture and first work is picture, which is 絵, and is pronounced eh. Letter, or character in Japanese is 文字, and is pronounced mōji. What existed before emojis? A word that did actually come from emotion is were used before emojis people would type different punctuation symbols, numbers and letters to resemble different example, when typed a colon and a close bracket looks like a smiley face, so it would be used to convey happiness :) How are new emojis created and approved? A non-profit organisation called Unicode Consortium are in charge of the creation of new can submit a proposal, and then Unicode look at them all and decide which to decisions are based on how many people across the world would recognise them and use them, among other approved, they're added to the Unicode Standard, and then companies like Apple and Google can choose to add them to their devices.
Daily Maverick
09-07-2025
- General
- Daily Maverick
Thumbs up: good or passive aggressive? How emojis became the most confusing kind of online language
Do you love using the laughing-crying emoji? If so, you're probably a Millennial. Emojis, as well as memes and other forms of short-form content, have become central to how we express ourselves and connect online. Yet as meanings shift across different contexts, so too does the potential for misunderstanding. A senior colleague of mine recently encountered some commentary about the 'slightly smiling' face emoji: 🙂 They approached me, asking whether it represented joy, as they had assumed, or if it had a more ominous meaning. As a chronically-online millennial, who unironically identifies as a gen Z, I bore the news that I, along with most younger internet users, only ever use it sarcastically. 'It doesn't actually signify happiness – more so fake happiness, or dry humour,' I explained. I also told them how the thumbs up emoji is often interpreted as passive aggressive, and that the only time I'd use the laughing-crying ('face with tears of joy') emoji is under duress. Despite seeming like a universal language – and sometimes they do function that way – emojis can be at once more vague, and more specific, than words. That's because you can't separate the meaning of a smiley from the person who sent it, nor from the person receiving it. Markers of age and identity While emojis were originally developed in the late 1990s by Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita to add emotional nuance to text-based messaging, their function has since evolved. Today, emojis are not just emotional cues; they also operate as cultural symbols and markers of identity. Research published last year highlights how these symbols can create subtle communication barriers across age groups. For instance, a study of Chinese-speaking WeChat users found younger and older people differed not only in how frequently they used emojis, but in how they interpreted and aesthetically preferred them. One emoji that's increasingly becoming a distinct marker of age is the previously mentioned laughing-crying emoji (😂). Despite being named Oxford Dictionary's 2015 word of the year, and frequently topping the most-used emoji charts, this smiley is on the decline among gen Z – who decided in 2020 that it wasn't cool anymore. Instead, they prefer the skull emoji (💀), which is shorthand for the gen Z catch phrase 'I'm dead'. This means something is funny (not that they're literally deceased). @bruhbruhski Like who was the first person to used this as a laughing emoji #emoji #imdead #bruh #texting #relatable #vibe ♬ This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) [2005 Remaster] – Talking Heads Such shifts may understandably be perplexing for older generations who are unfamiliar with evolving norms and slang. A digital body language Emojis can also take on distinct meanings on different platforms. They are embedded within ' platform vernaculars ': the ever-evolving styles of communication that are unique to specific digital spaces. For example, a thumbs up emoji (👍) from your boss at work is seemingly more acceptable, and less anxiety inducing, than from a romantic interest you've just sent a risky text to. This dilemma was echoed in a recent viral TikTok by user @kaitlynghull, which prompted thousands to comment about their shared confusion over emoji use in the workplace. This reaction highlights a deeper communication issue. A survey of 10,000 workers across the US, France, Germany, India and Australia, conducted by YouGov and software company Atlassian, found 65% of workers used emojis to convey tone in the workplace. But while 88% of gen Z workers thought emojis were helpful, this dropped to 49% for baby boomers and gen X. The survey concluded some emojis can be interpreted in multiple ways, and these double meanings aren't always safe for work. In with the 'it' crowd Another example of platform-specific emoji use comes from social media content creators who deploy emojis to curate a certain aesthetic. Under the Tiktok tag #emojicombo, you'll find thousands of videos showcasing emoji combinations that provide aesthetic 'inspo'. These combinations are used to represent different online identities or subcultures, such as 'that girl', ' clean girl' or 'old money '. Users may include the combinations in their captions or videos to signal their personal style, or to express the mood or vibe of their online persona. In this way, the emojis help shape how they present themselves on the platform. This example of emoji use is also a display of symbolic capital. It signals social alignment, in an environment where a user's visibility (and popularity) is determined by their platform fluency. Emojis, then, aren't just tools for expression. They are badges of identity that index where a user stands in the online cultural hierarchy. There's a fragmentation in how we relate A single emoji might communicate irony, sincerity or sarcasm, depending on who is using it, what platform they're using it on, and what generation they belong to. This gap points to deeper questions around online access and participation, and the systems that shape online cultures. And when the meaning of an emoji is platform-dependent and socially stratified, it can become as much about fitting in with a cultural in-group than conveying emotion. DM
