Texts get much of their tone from tiny pictures, and World Emoji Day on Saturday, July 17, 2027, is the day set aside for them. Even the date comes from an emoji.
Why July 17?
Look at the calendar emoji on an Apple device and you’ll see July 17. That makes it the only date shown in its own emoji, the World Emoji Day website points out.
Apple’s design dates back to 2002, when the company announced its iCal app at the MacWorld Expo. Some fans were already posting the calendar emoji on July 17 before the holiday existed.
Burge, Kurita and a 12-by-12 Grid
Jeremy Burge, who founded the emoji reference site Emojipedia, started the day in 2014. The first #WorldEmojiDay post went out on July 11 that year. Six days later came the first celebration.
It spread fast. In 2017, New York’s Empire State Building glowed “emoji yellow” for the occasion, and Google retired its blob-shaped emoji designs. Two years later, the British Library hosted a talk on emoji.
Emojipedia still looks after the day and runs its website. It also tracks new emoji as they’re approved.
The first set
Emoji started on Japanese phones. Shigetaka Kurita, a designer at the mobile company NTT DOCOMO, created 176 of them for phones and pagers. They were released in 1999, the Museum of Modern Art notes.
Each one fit on a tiny grid, just 12 pixels by 12. To fill those squares, Kurita borrowed from manga, the Zapf Dingbats typeface and the faces people typed with punctuation.
His set mixed weather symbols with a heart and a range of faces. MoMA now holds the originals, a gift from NTT DOCOMO, and showed them in a 2016 exhibition.
Even the name is Japanese. It joins e, meaning “picture,” with moji, meaning “character.”
Making them work everywhere
At first, each Japanese carrier used its own set, and the sets didn’t match. Sharing emoji across networks was a headache.
Unicode, the group that sets text standards for computers, approved a plan to add emoji in May 2007. Its version 5.2, in 2009, defined 722 characters drawn from the carriers’ sets. The rest arrived with Unicode 6.0 on October 11, 2010.
What a Picture Adds
Kurita built his set to support texting and mobile email on DOCOMO devices. Paired with words, MoMA says, emoji add nuance to intonation and fill in for body language.
The catalog keeps growing. Unicode’s Emoji 18.0 counts 3,960 emoji, or 3,972 once building-block components are included.
Organizers at Emojipedia say emoji are for everyone, and anyone can join in with the #WorldEmojiDay hashtag.
Fun Ways to Mark World Emoji Day
- Write in pictures only: send a friend an all-emoji message and see if they can decode it.
- Check the official name: look up what an emoji is called before you send it.
- Add alt text: describe emoji-heavy images so screen-reader users can follow along.
- Design your own: sketch an emoji on a 12-by-12 grid, the size Kurita worked with.
- Run a quiz: turn movie titles into emoji puzzles for friends and coworkers.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do new emoji get approved?
Proposals go to the Unicode Consortium, which weighs each candidate against published selection factors.
When did skin tones arrive?
Five skin tone modifiers came with Emoji 1.0 in 2015. They follow the Fitzpatrick scale, which dermatologists use to sort skin types.
How busy is Emojipedia?
It logs more than 45 million emoji lookups a month. The company Zedge owns both the site and the holiday.
How do people usually celebrate?
Some throw parties or share emoji art online. Companies often run emoji promotions and events.