JOIN USWorld Emoji Day: How much do you know?
World Emoji Day is celebrated on July 17. Emoji or Emojis are ideograms or smiles or expressions of feeling used in the electronic messages. It varies with genres, objects, places, weather conditions, animals, human facial expressions. The word Emoji is derived from a Japanese word which means picture+character. Before the origin of emoji, emoticons were used in the early 17the century art.
In 1999, Emojis began to be used in Japanese mobile phones. From then on, it became a universal expression while messaging and people started to use it widely in their electronic communications.
The first Emoji was developed by a man called Shigetaka Krita in Japan in 1999. He was a member of the team working on NTT DoCoMo's i-mode mobile Internet platform. He got inspiration from weather forecasts which used symbols to portray weather conditions. Japanese mobile operators NTT DoCoMo, Au, and SoftBank Mobile (formerly knowns as Vodafone) are the pioneers in using Emojis. Each of them presented emojis in their own unique ways.
The first and the basic feature with 176 12×12 pixel Emoji was developed for i-mode's messaging features. Later, Kuria developed the first 180 Emoji expressions and they were used in phones. These are just characters that symbolise cloud, rain, car, ship and so on. They never conveyed the real message or never looked as we see today. After a few years, other mobile rival companies started using the emojis and even companies like Apple started using it. Then Google came forward to make recognised emojis by the Unicode Consortium.
Emoji are sometimes misunderstood in different cultural contexts. The message of the sender can be interpreted differently by the receiver depending on the cultural context and the meaning. Another major problem is the version of software used by the sender and receiver. Each version has their own modification of emojis. The latest version of Unicode 11.0 represents emoji using 1,250 characters.
Lately, 157 new Emojis of Emoji 11.0 version are added to the recognised Emoji 2018 list.
