World Emoji Day: When was the first emoji created and how the smiley face evolved

Emojis are quite popular in texting among people.

The small characters, initially created in the late 1990s, have gained popularity because of their ability to express flat-text emotions in depth.

They have become synonymous with communication and appear everywhere, including in corporate communications and news releases.

However, are you aware of the origins of the emoticons? Let’s take a look.

The creation of emoticons

On September 19, 1982, Scott Fahlman, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, is believed to have invented emoticons, by combining a colon, a hyphen, and a close parenthesis – “:-)”

According to CNN, he posted the emoticon on the school’s online bulletin board, a platform socially accessible to others on the university’s closed intranet. The platform was then limited to text only.

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The smiley face has been dubbed the “first internet emoticon” by Guinness World Records and is the text-only ancestor of today’s graphical emojis. With the tiny characters, Fahlman tried to solve the problem of conveying emotions online.

“Somebody would say something that was meant to be sarcastic. Among many readers, one person wouldn’t get the joke and would respond with anger, hostility, and pretty soon the initial discussion had disappeared, and everybody was arguing with everyone. When you’re on a text-only internet medium, people can’t tell if you’re kidding or not. There’s no body language, no facial expressions," he told CNN.

Emojis and its evolution

Soon after the emoticon was created, winking faces, noseless smiles and open-mouth gasps emerged out of the classic colon, dash and parentheses grin.

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These advanced further when Japanese cell phone company NTT Docomo introduced a small black heart on pagers in the mid-1990s.

In 1997, another Japanese firm, SoftBank, released a 90-character emoji on a mobile phone model, according to Discover magazine.

But it was only in 1999, when the graphics were clear to the general public when Docomo’s 176-character collection was released.

These 176-character emoji were created by Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurlta, and are now part of the permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, according to Wired. There were characters to show the weather, traffic, hobbies, technology, modes of transportation, numbers and all the phases of the moon.

Standardisation

In 2007, a software internationalisation team at Google, comprising Kat Momoi, Mark Davis, and Markus Scherer, noticed emoji’s ascent in Japan and contended that emoji should fall under the same standard.

They led the charge in a petition to get emoji recognised by the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit body, similar to the United Nations, to maintain text standards across computers.

The step was necessary because, before Unicode, there were hundreds of different encoding systems and different systems and servers could not always represent text te same way.

Unicode focused on standardising these codes for different languages and letters typed in English, Chinese, Arabic or others.

In 2009, Apple engineers Yasuo Kida and Peter Edberg submitted an official proposal to adopt 625 new emoji characters into the Unicode Standard.

The body accepted that proposal in 2010, which made emoji accessible everywhere. Unicode ultimately decided to index emoji “because of their use as characters for text-messaging in a number of Japanese manufacturers’ corporate standards,” according to Wired.

In 2011, Apple added an official emoji keyboard available outside Japan, making characters’ true entrance into the US digital lexicon, as per CNN.

Later, Android followed suit after two years, allowing people to access emojis directly from a keyboard on their phones and popularising emojis with an entirely new audience.

The New York Times suggested the move could give emoji a shot at “mainstream success,” noting that young people were already adjusting their texting habits to include the small icons.

By 2015, the face with tears emoji (😂) became the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year.

Today, there are more than 3,600 emojis available for people to express their emotions and give a deeper sense of embodiment. However, the main usage remains loyal to the original one created 40 years ago of a smile.

The future

As language continues to evolve, so does emojis.

Unicode releases set emoji updates each September after considering submitted proposals and responding to the latest trends in the world.

On Tuesday, it released Version 15.0.0, adding 20 emoji characters, including a hair pick, maracas and jellyfish.

Unicode has also faced backlash over the years due to its lack of race, gender, sexuality and disability representation in earlier emoji sets.

This led to the release of five skin tone options in 2015’s Emoji 2.0 and two gender options for professions in 2016’s Emoji 4.0, according to Emojipedia.

In 2019, they introduced accessibility emojis and gender-inclusive couple options.

Notably, the consortium relies on subcommittee members and emoji users to push the keyboard forward. Daniel, a designer at Google, was the first woman to run the group’s Emoji Subcommittee and has been the reason behind the creation of more inclusive emojis, reported CNN.

To prevent an Apple user from misinterpreting a non-gendered police officer delivered from a Samsung device as a police officer, she has advocated for inclusive design adoption across all industries.

With inputs from agencies