OMG! The History of Emojis May Surprise You

The first-ever emoji set came from Japan, but its creator is disputed.

By Marisa Sloan
Jul 19, 2023 6:00 PM
Closeup of emojis on an iPhone
The word emoji comes from the Japanese words for picture (pronounced “eh”) and letter or character (pronounced “mōji”). (Credit: Tada Images/Shutterstock)

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You probably know them, even if you don’t love them. 

They pop up on social media and in text messages — how else would you share your Wordle score without giving away the solution? — and have even infiltrated advertisements and work emails. In 2015, the Oxford Dictionary chose one as its “word” of the year.

We’re talking, of course, about emojis. 

The colorful pictographs are superb substitutes for those things that are sometimes lost in text-based communication: emotions, body language, tone of voice. And with more than 3,600 to choose from in the Unicode Standard, emojis have somewhat become a language of their own.

How, then, did we get here? As it turns out, there’s a bit of a debate surrounding the creation of the first emojis.

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