the.com/emoji wall
a mosaic where a thousand tiny faces say what words gave up on.
means A dense block or grid of emoji used as a reply, decoration, or reaction — a wall of tiny pictures standing in for actual sentences.
from A compound of two newer words. "Emoji" comes from Japanese, where 絵 (e, "picture") joins 文字 (moji, "character") — the resemblance to English "emotion" is pure coincidence, a happy accident of sound. "Wall" is the old Germanic word for a barrier or surface, here borrowing the sense it picked up online from the social-media "wall," the public space where posts pile up. So an "emoji wall" is a recent native-internet coinage: a surface crowded with little pictures instead of words.
- origin
- emoji means picture-character in Japanese, not emotion
- first set
- 176 emoji designed in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita
- unicode
- over 3,700 official emoji exist today
- art status
- the original 176 live in MoMA's collection
- most used
- the laughing-crying face won the decade
times square billboard — massive digital display in new york city showing animated emojis and reactions in real-time
slack emoji wall — reaction wall feature in slack workspaces where teams react to messages with emoji reactions since 2013