Emoji

Etymology:

Many assume the word emoji has roots in emotion, but the resemblance is purely coincidental. It actually comes from the Japanese for picture (絵, pronounced eh), plus letter, or character (文字, mōji). Essentially, the word describes a pictograph. While the word itself may have no etymological link to the word emotion ?, the way we use emoji tells us a lot about who we are, and how we connect with each other ?.

In the 1990s, the Japanese mobile phone operator DoCoMo struck gold. The company tacked a heart pictograph option onto a cheap pager, which was a massive success with teenagers. But when the company released a new version of the pager geared toward businesspeople—and without the heart button—it incited an “outcry.” Many users even left DoCoMo and signed up for another pager company that had adopted the heart.

“That’s when I knew that symbols absolutely had to be part of any texting service,” Shigetaka Kurita told The Guardian. “That was my main inspiration.”

Kurita led the team at DoCoMo that designed a set of 176 pixelated characters inspired by basic concepts of things like weather, food, and feelings. They were called emoji—a word that originally meant “pictograph” or “icon” in general, for a button like “save” or “quit.” The first set of emoji launched on DoCoMo phones in 1999.

Other Japanese carriers quickly followed Docomo’s lead and developed their own versions of the pictographs, and since then, emoji have exploded ??. In 2007, the Unicode Consortium, a Silicon Valley nonprofit that standardizes software and code across platforms, began to standardized emoji as well so they would appear more or less the same across the internet, regardless of what type of phone, mobile network, computer, or website emoji were accessed from. Emoji became a staple in the U.S. when an emoji keyboard was added to Apple iPhones by 2011.

As of June 2018, we can choose from over 3,000 emoji. On Facebook Messenger, people send and receive 5 billion emoji every single day. Today, the concept of emoji has been ingrained into culture, and is now part of our everyday vocabulary. The ? emoji was even Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year in 2015.

Sure, plenty of those emoji zipping across the world every day are likely along the lines of ❤️ and ?. But emoji can be used for public health purposes, too. In 2015, Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation proposed a mosquito emoji to raise awareness about global mosquito-borne illnesses, and make it easier to communicate across cultures and languages about the public health risks of the insect. The mosquito emoji was approved in February 2018, and hit most emoji keyboards in June. But the science of emoji doesn’t stop there.