A Japanese man named Shigetaka Kurita invented emojis.
Kurita worked for NTT DoCoMo, a big Japanese mobile communications company. He was part of a team tasked with developing the company’s first mobile Internet system. Their system limited users to 250 characters in messages, so Kurita thought emojis would allow users to communicate more effectively while using fewer data.
The first set of emojis contained 176 very simple, 12-pixel by 12-pixel images that expressed a variety of emotions and ideas, including emojis for things like the weather, foods, drinks, feelings, and moods. Kurita took inspiration from Japanese comics (manga) and the logographic Chinese characters used in the modern Japanese writing system (kanji).
The word emoji literally means “picture” (e) “character” (moji). Emojis are different than emoticons. Emoticons have a similar purpose, but they’re composed using regular characters. For example, you can create a smiley face using a colon, a dash, and a parenthesis: :-). Emojis, on the other hand, are actual pictures or icons.
Kurita’s emojis were a huge hit in Japan, and they soon were adopted by other Japanese technology companies. It took a while for them to spread to other technology platforms in other countries, however.
The popularity of emojis in the United States is attributed largely to their inclusion by Apple in its iOS operating system in the late 2000s. The emoji floodgates truly opened in 2010 when emojis were standardized by Unicode, which is the universal standard for character-based electronic communication. Standardization meant that technology companies, such as Microsoft, Google, Twitter, and Facebook, could develop their own emojis that could be recognized regardless of operating system.