Emojis are small pictorial symbols used in text messages and on social media platforms.

They come in many forms, such as facial expressions (😊), objects (🍎), and symbols (⚠️).

Unlike regular images, emojis are defined by an international standard called Unicode—just like letters and numbers.

This ensures that they retain the same meaning across different devices and apps.

Emojis were created in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita while he was working at NTT DoCoMo in Japan.

To enhance communication on mobile phones, which had limited character space at the time, 176 small emoji images were designed.

Later on, other mobile companies developed their own emojis, and by 2009-2010, emojis were officially adopted into Unicode, becoming a global standard.

Emojis originated in Japan. The term "emoji" itself is Japanese, combining the words for "picture" (絵) and "character" (文字). In English, we simply call them "emoji" too.

Initially part of Japan's mobile phone culture, emojis gained worldwide popularity after Apple introduced them on the iPhone. Today, they're internationally recognized as "emoji."

New emojis are decided by the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit organization that includes major tech companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Meta (formerly Facebook).

Anyone can submit a proposal for a new emoji, but for it to be accepted, it must meet strict criteria. These include cultural relevance, distinctiveness from existing emojis, and predicted usage worldwide.

Unicode is a standard character encoding system designed to handle text from all over the world in a unified way.

It assigns unique numbers, known as code points, to characters from various languages, including Japanese, English, and Arabic.

Emojis are also part of Unicode. For example, the 😀 emoji is assigned the code point "U+1F600." This ensures that the same emoji can be displayed consistently across different devices and apps.

While the Unicode for emojis is standardized, each platform—like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Samsung—creates its own unique designs.

For instance, the "😊" emoji might look slightly different on an iPhone compared to an Android device. This variation happens because each company designs their emojis according to their own style guidelines.

Although the basic meaning remains the same, the appearance can vary.

Emojis like 🈲, 🈵, and 🈹 include many symbols culturally specific Japanese symbols.

This is because emojis originated in Japan, and the early emoji sets featured symbols closely tied to Japanese life.

When these emojis were adopted into Unicode, these Japan-specific symbols were included to ensure compatibility across different mobile phones. While they're now used worldwide, many people might not know their meanings.

Emoji designs are created by the design teams of each platform. Companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, X (formerly Twitter), and Samsung all have their own designers working on them.

Designers create emojis that align with their company's design guidelines, based on the descriptions in the Unicode specifications. That's why the same emoji can look different depending on the platform you're using.

Person emojis come with skin tone and gender variations. This is made possible through a system called Emoji modifiers.

By combining a base emoji (like ✌️) with a skin tone modifier, you can express different skin colors.

• 🏻 → ✌🏻
• 🏼 → ✌🏼
• 🏽 → ✌🏽
• 🏾 → ✌🏾
• 🏿 → ✌🏿

You can also create more complex emojis, like family (👨‍👩‍👧‍👦) or professions (👩‍⚕️), by combining multiple emojis using a special character called a ZWJ (Zero Width Joiner).

Even if an emoji is defined by Unicode, it might not display correctly if your device or font doesn't support that emoji's image data. In such cases, you might see a blank box (often called "tofu") or garbled text instead.

Since new emojis are added every year, older operating systems or apps might not have the necessary fonts to display them. Also, because each platform updates at different times, some devices might show certain emojis while others can't.

Sometimes updating your OS or app to the latest version can solve the issue, but there are cases where it's beyond your control on your end.