the.com/emoji
tiny pictures that hijacked language because typing words got too exhausting for everyone
means A small digital image or icon used in electronic messages to express an idea, emotion, or object, like a smiley face or a heart.
from Straight from Japanese, where 絵 (e) means "picture" and 文字 (moji) means "character" or "letter" — so literally "picture-character." The resemblance to English "emotion" and "emoticon" is a happy accident; despite how natural it feels, the two are unrelated. Emoji were born on Japanese mobile phones in the late 1990s and went global once they were folded into the Unicode standard, the same system that decides which characters every device can display.
- origin
- Born in 1990s Japan from a phone designer's sketches
- meaning
- From Japanese 'e' (picture) plus 'moji' (character)
- museum piece
- MoMA acquired the original 176 emoji set
- top dog
- Tears of joy is the most-used worldwide
- governance
- A nonprofit committee votes on every new emoji
pile of poo — unicode character u+1f4a9, became infamous emoji used in ios/android by 2010s