Emoji

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.

[12][13] The emoji was predated by the emoticon,[14] 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.

[15] 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.

[17][18] 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.

Elsewhere in the 1990s, Nokia phones began including preset pictograms in its text messaging app, which they defined as "smileys and symbols".

In August 2007, a team made up of Mark Davis and his colleagues Kat Momoi and Markus Scherer began petitioning the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) in an attempt to standardise the emoji.

[43] Peter Edberg and Yasuo Kida joined the collaborative effort from Apple Inc. shortly after, and their official UTC proposal came in January 2009 with 625 new emoji characters.

[54] Pending the assignment of standard Unicode code points, Google and Apple implemented emoji support via Private Use Area schemes.

[74] Unicode 8.0 (June 2015) added another 41 emoji, including articles of sports equipment such as the cricket bat, food items such as the taco, new facial expressions, and symbols for places of worship, as well as five characters (crab, scorpion, lion face, bow and arrow, amphora) to improve support for pictorial rather than symbolic representations of the signs of the Zodiac.

This introduced the mechanism of skin tone indicators, the first official recommendations about which Unicode characters were to be considered emoji, and the first official recommendations about which characters were to be displayed in an emoji font in the absence of a variation selector, and listed the zero-width joiner sequences for families and couples that were implemented by existing vendors.

[82] The popularity of emoji has caused pressure from vendors and international markets to add additional designs into the Unicode standard to meet the demands of different cultures.

[90] Oxford Dictionaries President Caspar Grathwohl expressed that "traditional alphabet scripts have been struggling to meet the rapid-fire, visually focused demands of 21st Century communication.

[93] Some emoji are specific to Japanese culture, such as a bowing businessman (U+1F647 🙇 PERSON BOWING DEEPLY), the shoshinsha mark used to indicate a beginner driver (U+1F530 🔰 JAPANESE SYMBOL FOR BEGINNER), a white flower (U+1F4AE 💮 WHITE FLOWER) used to denote "brilliant homework",[94] or a group of emoji representing popular foods: ramen noodles (U+1F35C 🍜 STEAMING BOWL), dango (U+1F361 🍡 DANGO), onigiri (U+1F359 🍙 RICE BALL), curry (U+1F35B 🍛 CURRY AND RICE), and sushi (U+1F363 🍣 SUSHI).

Unicode Consortium founder Mark Davis compared the use of emoji to a developing language, particularly mentioning the American use of eggplant (U+1F346 🍆 AUBERGINE) to represent a phallus.

'[111] In 2017, the MIT Media Lab published DeepMoji, a deep neural network sentiment analysis algorithm that was trained on 1.2 billion emoji occurrences in Twitter data from 2013 to 2017.

[112][113] DeepMoji was found to outperform human subjects in correctly identifying sarcasm in Tweets and other online modes of communication.

[120] A 6-country user experience study showed that emoji-based scales (specifically the usage of smileys) may ease the challenges related to translation and implementation for brief cross-cultural surveys.

[125] For example, people in China have developed a system for using emoji subversively so that a smiley face could be sent to convey a despising, mocking, and obnoxious attitude, as the orbicularis oculi (the muscle near that upper eye corner) on the face of the emoji does not move, and the orbicularis oris (the one near the mouth) tightens, which is believed to be a sign of suppressing a smile.

As an example, in April 2020, British actress and presenter Jameela Jamil posted a tweet from her iPhone using the Face with Hand Over Mouth emoji (🤭) as part of a comment on people shopping for food during the COVID-19 pandemic.

[128] Emoji characters vary slightly between platforms within the limits in meaning defined by the Unicode specification, as companies have tried to provide artistic presentations of ideas and objects.

For example, U+1F485 💅 NAIL POLISH has been described as being used in English-language communities to signify "non-caring fabulousness"[133] and "anything from shutting haters down to a sense of accomplishment".

[137] In the lead-up to the 2016 Summer Olympics, the Unicode Consortium considered proposals to add several Olympic-related emoji, including medals and events such as handball and water polo.

In addition, while the original incarnations of the modern pentathlon emoji depicted its five events, including a man pointing a gun, the final glyph contains a person riding a horse, along with a laser pistol target in the corner.

[137] Conversely, the following day, Microsoft pushed out an update to Windows 10 that changed its longstanding depiction of the pistol emoji as a toy raygun to a real revolver.

[142] By 2018, most major platforms such as Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Facebook, and Twitter had transitioned their rendering of the pistol emoji to match Apple's water gun implementation.

[93][95][146][147] Beginning in December 2014, the hashtag #EggplantFridays began to rise to popularity on Instagram for use in marking photos featuring clothed or unclothed penises.

[146][147] This became such a popular trend that, beginning in April 2015, Instagram disabled the ability to search for not only the #EggplantFridays tag, but also other eggplant-containing hashtags, including simply #eggplant and #🍆.

There are four different formats used for multi-color glyphs in an SFNT font,[158] not all of which are necessarily supported by a given operating system library or software package such as a web browser or graphical program.

Prior to October 2017, Facebook had different sets for the main site and for its Messenger service, where only the former provides complete coverage.

[168] However, the Unicode Technical Committee has since determined that unifying colourful emoji characters with textual symbols and dingbats was a "mistake", and resolved to allocate new code points rather than defining new presentation sequences.