The History of Emojis: From π to π₯Ή
Emojis are now used over 10 billion times per day. But they started as 176 tiny pixelated icons created by one person in Japan. Here's the full story.
1999: The First Emoji
Shigetaka Kurita, a designer at NTT DoCoMo, created the first set of 176 emoji for the i-mode mobile internet platform in Japan.
His inspiration: weather symbols in newspapers, Chinese characters, and street signs. Each emoji was 12x12 pixels.
The original set included basic faces, weather, food, transport, and symbols β the categories we still use today.
2000s: Emoji Goes Mobile
Japanese mobile carriers SoftBank and KDDI developed their own competing emoji sets, often incompatible with each other.
Emoji remained largely unknown outside Japan until the iPhone arrived. In 2008, Apple released a secret emoji keyboard for Japanese iPhone users β accessible by enabling Japanese keyboard settings.
In 2009, a group of Google engineers petitioned Unicode to standardize emoji, worried that Japanese emoji would be lost in email conversion.
2010: Unicode Standardization
Unicode 6.0 (October 2010) included 722 emoji characters β making emoji cross-platform for the first time.
In 2011, Apple added the emoji keyboard to iOS 5 globally, making it accessible to all iPhone users worldwide. Android followed in 2013.
2015-Present: Diversity & Expansion
Unicode 8.0 (2015) introduced skin tone modifiers, allowing 5 skin tone options for people emoji.
New emoji are added each year through a formal Unicode proposal process. Any person or organization can submit a proposal.
As of Unicode 15.1, there are over 3,600 emoji in the standard, with new additions each year covering diverse cultures, foods, and experiences.