Topic: emoji

An emoji ( i-MOH-jee; plural emoji or emojis) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram or smiley

embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of emoji
is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed conversation. Some examples of emoji
are 😂, 😃, 🧘🏻‍♂️, 🌍, 🍞, 🚗, 📞, 🎉, ❤️, 🍆, and 🏁. Emoji exist in various genres, including facial
expressions, common objects, places and types of weather, and animals. They are much like
emoticons, but emoji are pictures rather than typographic approximations; the term "emoji" in
the strict sense refers to such pictures which can be represented as encoded characters, but it is
sometimes applied to messaging stickers by extension. Originally meaning pictograph, the word
emoji comes from Japanese e (絵, 'picture') + moji (文字, 'character'); the resemblance to the
English words emotion and emoticon is purely coincidental. The ISO 15924 script code for
emoji is Zsye.

Originating on Japanese mobile phones in 1997, emoji became increasingly popular worldwide
in the 2010s after being added to several mobile operating systems. They are now considered to
be a large part of popular culture in the West and around the world. In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries
named the Face with Tears of Joy emoji (😂) the word of the year.

History
PLATO system (1970s)

Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope write that the first digital emojis were created by Bruce Parello, a
student at the University of Illinois, on PLATO IV, the first e-learning system, in 1972.

Evolution from emoticons (1990s)

The emoji was predated by the emoticon, a concept first put into practice in 1982 by computer
scientist Scott Fahlman when he suggested text-based symbols such as :-) and :-( could be used
to replace language. Theories about language replacement can be traced back to the 1960s, when
Russian novelist and professor Vladimir Nabokov stated in an interview with The New York
Times: "I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile — some sort of
concave mark, a supine round bracket." It did not become a mainstream concept until the 1990s
when Japanese, American and European companies started experimenting with modified
versions of Fahlman's idea.

Wingdings, a font invented by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes, was first used by Microsoft in
1990. It could be used to send pictographs in rich text messages, but would only load on devices
with the Wingdings font installed. In 1995, the French newspaper Le Monde announced that
Alcatel would be launching a new phone, the BC 600. Its welcome screen displayed a digital
smiley face, replacing the usual text seen as part of the "welcome message" often seen on other
devices at the time. In 1997, J-Phone launched the SkyWalker DP-211SW, which contained a set
of 90 emoji. It is thought to be the first set of its kind. Its designs, each measuring 12 by 12
pixels were black and white, depicting numbers, sports, the time, moon phases and the weather.
It notably contained the Pile of Poo emoji. The J-Phone model experienced low sales, and the
emoji set was thus rarely used.In 1999, Shigetaka Kurita created 176 emoji as part of NTT
DoCoMo's i-mode, used on its mobile platform. They were intended to help facilitate electronic
communication, and to serve as a distinguishing feature from other services. Due to their
influence, Kurita's designs were once frequently claimed to be the first cellular emoji; however,
Kurita has denied this to be the case. According to interviews, he took inspiration from Japanese
manga where characters are often drawn with symbolic representations called manpu (such as a
water drop on a face representing representing nervousness or confusion), and weather
pictograms used to depict the weather conditions at any given time. He also drew inspiration
from Chinese characters and street sign pictograms. Kurita's work is now displayed in the
Museum of Modern Art in New York City.Kurita's emoji were brightly colored, albeit with a
single color per glyph. General-use emoji, such as sports, actions and weather, can easily be
traced back to Kurita's emoji set. The notable absentee from the set was the use of pictograms
that demonstrated emotion. The yellow-faced emoji commonly used today evolved from other
emoticon sets and cannot be traced back to Kurita's work. His set was also made up of generic
images much like the J-Phones. Elsewhere in the 1990s, Nokia phones began including preset
pictograms in its text messaging app, which they defined as "smileys and symbols". A third
notable emoji set was introduced by Japanese mobile phone brand au by KDDI.

Development of emoji sets (2000–2007)

The basic 12-by-12-pixel emoji in Japan grew in popularity across various platforms over the
next decade. This was aided by the popularity of DoCoMo i-mode, which for many was the
origins of the smartphone. The i-mode service also saw the introduction of emoji in conversation
form on messenger apps. By 2004, i-mode had 40 million subscribers, meaning numerous people
were exposed to the emoji for the first time between 2000 and 2004. The popularity of i-mode
led to other manufacturers competing with similar offerings and therefore developed their own
emoji sets. While emoji adoption was high in Japan during this time, the companies failed to
collaborate and come up with a uniform set of emoji to be used across all platforms in the
country.

The Universal Coded Character Set (Unicode), overseen by the Unicode Consortium and
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2, had already been established as the international standard for text
representation (ISO/IEC 10646) since 1993, although variants of Shift JIS remained relatively
common in Japan. Unicode included several characters which would subsequently be classified
as emoji, including some from North American or Western European sources such as DOS code
page 437, ITC Zapf Dingbats or the WordPerfect Iconic Symbols set. Unicode's coverage of
written characters was extended several times by new editions during the 2000s, with little
interest in incorporating the Japanese cellular emoji sets (which were deemed out of scope),
although symbol characters which would subsequently be classified as emoji continued to be
added. For example, Unicode 4.0 release contained 16 new emoji, which included direction
arrows, a warning triangle, and an eject button. Besides Zapf Dingbats, other dingbat fonts such
as Wingdings or Webdings also included additional pictographic symbols in their own custom pi
font encodings; unlike Zapf Dingbats, however, many of these would not be available as
Unicode emoji until 2014.The Smiley Company developed The Smiley Dictionary, which was
launched in 2001. The desktop platform was aimed at allowing people to insert smileys as text
when sending emails and writing on a desktop computer. The smiley toolbar offered a variety of
symbols and smileys and was used on platforms such as MSN Messenger. Nokia as one of the
largest telecoms companies globally at the time, were still referring to today's emoji sets as
smileys in 2001. The digital smiley movement was headed up by Nicolas Loufrani, the CEO of
The Smiley Company. He created a smiley toolbar, which was available at smileydictionary.com
during the early 2000s to be sent as emoji are today.

Beginnings of Unicode emoji (2008–2014)

Mobile providers in both the United States and Europe began discussions on how to introduce
their own emoji sets from 2004 onwards. Many companies did not begin to take emoji seriously
until Google employees requested that Unicode look into the possibility of a uniform emoji set.
Apple quickly followed and began to collaborate with not only Google, but also providers in
Europe and Japan. In August 2007, Mark Davis and his colleagues Kat Momoi and Markus
Scherer wrote the first draft for consideration by the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) to
introduce emoji into the Unicode standard. The UTC, having previously deemed emoji to be out
of scope for Unicode, made the decision to broaden this scope, to enable compatibility with the
Japanese cellular carrier formats which were becoming more widespread. Peter Edberg and
Yasuo Kida joined the collaborative efforts from Apple Inc. shortly after and the official UTC
proposal as co-authors came in January 2009.

Pending the assignment of standard Unicode code points, Google and Apple implemented emoji
support via Private Use Area schemes. Google first introduced emoji in Gmail in October 2008,
in collaboration with au by KDDI, and Apple introduced the first release of Apple Color Emoji
to iPhone OS on 21 November 2008. Initially, Apple's emoji support was implemented for
holders of a SoftBank SIM card; the emoji themselves were represented using SoftBank's Private
Use Area scheme and mostly resembled the SoftBank designs. Gmail emoji used their own
Private Use Area scheme, in a supplementary Private Use plane.Separately, a proposal had been
submitted in 2008 to add the ARIB extended characters used in broadcasting in Japan to
Unicode. This included several pictographic symbols. These were added in Unicode 5.2 in 2009,
a year before the cellular emoji sets were fully added; they include several characters which
either also appeared amongst the cellular emoji or were subsequently classified as emoji.After
iPhone users in the United States discovered that downloading Japanese apps allowed access to
the keyboard, pressure grew to expand the availability of the emoji keyboard beyond Japan. The
Emoji application for iOS, which altered the Settings app to allow access to the emoji keyboard,
was created by Josh Gare in February 2010. Before the existence of Gare's Emoji app, Apple had
intended for the emoji keyboard to only be available in Japan in iOS version 2.2.Throughout
2009, members of the Unicode Consortium and national standardization bodies of various
countries gave feedback and proposed changes to the international standardization of the emoji.
The feedback from various bodies in the United States, Europe, and Japan agreed on a set of 722
emoji as the standard set. This would be released in October 2010 in Unicode 6.0. Apple made
the emoji keyboard available to those outside of Japan in iOS version 5.0 in 2011. Later,
Unicode 7.0 (June 2014) added the character repertoires of the Webdings and Wingdings fonts to
Unicode, resulting in approximately 250 more Unicode emoji.The Unicode emoji whose code
points were assigned in 2014 or earlier are therefore taken from several sources. A single
character could exist in multiple sources, and characters from a source were unified with existing
characters where appropriate: for example, the "shower" weather symbol (☔️) from the ARIB
source was unified with an existing umbrella with raindrops character, which had been added for
KPS 9566 compatibility. The emoji characters named "Rain" ("雨", ame) from all three Japanese
carriers were in turn unified with the ARIB character. However, the Unicode Consortium groups
the most significant sources of emoji into four categories:

UTS #51 and modern emoji (2015–present)

In late 2014, a Public Review Issue was created by the Unicode Technical Committee, seeking
feedback on a proposed Unicode Technical Report (UTR) titled "Unicode Emoji". This was
intended to improve interoperability of emoji between vendors, and define a means of supporting
multiple skin tones. The feedback period closed in January 2015. Also in January 2015, the use
of the zero width joiner to indicate that a sequence of emoji could be shown as a single
equivalent glyph (analogous to a ligature) as a means of implementing emoji without atomic
code points, such as varied compositions of families, was discussed within the "emoji ad-hoc
committee".Unicode 8.0 (June 2015) added another 41 emoji, including articles of sports
equipment such as the cricket bat, food items such as the taco, new facial expressions, and
symbols for places of worship, as well as five characters (crab, scorpion, lion face, bow and
arrow, amphora) to improve support for pictorial rather than symbolic representations of the
signs of the Zodiac.Also in June 2015, the first approved version ("Emoji 1.0") of the Unicode
Emoji report was published as Unicode Technical Report #51 (UTR #51). This introduced the
mechanism of skin tone indicators, the first official recommendations about which Unicode
characters were to be considered emoji, and the first official recommendations about which
characters were to be displayed in an emoji font in absence of a variation selector, and listed the
zero width joiner sequences for families and couples that were implemented by existing vendors.
Maintenance of UTR #51, taking emoji requests, and creating proposals for emoji characters and
emoji mechanisms was made the responsibility of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee (ESC),
operating as a subcommittee of the Unicode Technical Committee,With the release of version
5.0 in May 2017 alongside Unicode 10.0, UTR #51 was redesignated a Unicode Technical
Standard (UTS #51), making it an independent specification rather than merely an informative
document. As of July 2017, there were 2,666 Unicode emoji listed. The next version of UTS #51
(published in May 2018) skipped to the version number Emoji 11.0, so as to synchronise its
major version number with the corresponding version of the Unicode Standard.The popularity of
emoji has caused pressure from vendors and international markets to add additional designs into
the Unicode standard to meet the demands of different cultures. Some characters now defined as
emoji are inherited from a variety of pre-Unicode messenger systems not only used in Japan,
including Yahoo and MSN Messenger.Corporate demand for emoji standardization has placed
pressures on the Unicode Consortium, with some members complaining that it had overtaken the
group's traditional focus on standardizing characters used for minority languages and
transcribing historical records. Conversely, the Consortium recognises that public desire for
emoji support has put pressure on vendors to improve their Unicode support, which is especially
true for characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, thus leading to better support for
Unicode's historic and minority scripts in deployed software.

Cultural influence
Oxford Dictionaries named U+1F602 😂 FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY its 2015 Word of the
Year. Oxford noted that 2015 had seen a sizable increase in the use of the word "emoji" and
recognized its impact on popular culture. Oxford Dictionaries President Caspar Grathwohl
expressed that "traditional alphabet scripts have been struggling to meet the rapid-fire, visually
focused demands of 21st Century communication. It's not surprising that a pictographic script
like emoji has stepped in to fill those gaps—it's flexible, immediate, and infuses tone
beautifully." SwiftKey found that "Face with Tears of Joy" was the most popular emoji across
the world. The American Dialect Society declared U+1F346 🍆 AUBERGINE to be the "Most
Notable Emoji" of 2015 in their Word of the Year vote.Some emoji are specific to Japanese
culture, such as a bowing businessman (U+1F647 🙇 ), the shoshinsha mark used to indicate a
beginner driver (U+1F530 🔰 ), a white flower (U+1F4AE 💮 ) used to denote "brilliant
homework", or a group of emoji representing popular foods: ramen noodles (U+1F35C 🍜 ),
dango (U+1F361 🍡 ), onigiri (U+1F359 🍙 ), Japanese curry (U+1F35B 🍛 ), and sushi (U+1F363
🍣 ). Unicode Consortium founder Mark Davis compared the use of emoji to a developing
language, particularly mentioning the American use of eggplant (U+1F346 🍆 ) to represent a
phallus. Some linguists have classified emoji and emoticons as discourse markers.In December
2015 a sentiment analysis of emoji was published, and the Emoji Sentiment Ranking 1.0 was
provided. In 2016, a musical about emoji premiered in Los Angeles. The computer-animated The
Emoji Movie was released in summer 2017.In January 2017, in what is believed to be the first
large-scale study of emoji usage, researchers at the University of Michigan analysed over 1.2
billion messages input via the Kika Emoji Keyboard and announced that the Face With Tears of
Joy was the most popular emoji. The Heart and the Heart eyes emoji stood second and third
respectively. The study also found that the French use heart emoji the most. People in countries
like Australia, France and the Czech Republic used more happy emoji, while this was not so for
people in Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Argentina, where people used more negative emoji in
comparison to cultural hubs known for restraint and self-discipline, like Turkey, France and
Russia.There has been discussion among legal experts on whether or not emoji could be
admissible as evidence in court trials. Furthermore, as emoji continue to develop and grow as a
"language" of symbols, there may also be the potential of the formation of emoji "dialects".
Emoji are being used as more than just to show reactions and emotions. Snapchat has even
incorporated emoji in its trophy and friends system with each emoji showing a complex
meaning.

Emoji that further modern causes

On March 5, 2019, a drop of blood emoji was released, which is intended to help break the
stigma of menstruation. In addition to normalizing periods, it will also be relevant to describe
medical topics such as donating blood and other blood-related activities.A mosquito emoji was
added in 2018 to raise awareness for diseases spread by the insect, such as dengue and malaria.

Emoji communication problems

Research has shown that emoji are often misunderstood. In some cases, this misunderstanding is
related to how the actual emoji design is interpreted by the viewer; in other cases, the emoji that
was sent is not shown in the same way on the receiving side.The first issue relates to the cultural
or contextual interpretation of the emoji. When the author picks an emoji, they think about it in a
certain way, but the same character may not trigger the same thoughts in the mind of the receiver
(see also Models of communication).

For example, people in China have developed a system for using emoji subversively, so that a
smiley face could be sent to convey a despising, mocking, and even obnoxious attitude, as the
orbicularis oculi (the muscle near that upper eye corner) on the face of the emoji does not move,
and the orbicularis oris (the one near the mouth) tightens, which is believed to be a sign of
suppressing a smile.The second problem relates to technology and branding. When an author of a
message picks an emoji from a list, it is normally encoded in a non-graphical manner during the
transmission, and if the author and the reader do not use the same software or operating system
for their devices, the reader's device may visualize the same emoji in a different way. Small
changes to a character's look may completely alter its perceived meaning with the receiver. As an
example, in April 2020, British actress and presenter Jameela Jamil posted a tweet from her
iPhone using the Face with Hand Over Mouth emoji (🤭) as part of a comment on people
shopping for food during the COVID-19 pandemic. On Apple's iOS, the emoji expression is
neutral and pensive, but on other platforms the emoji shows as a giggling face. Many fans were
initially upset thinking that she, as a well off celebrity, was mocking poor people, but this was
not her intended meaning.Researchers from German Studies Institute at Ruhr-Universität
Bochum found that most people can easily understand an emoji when it replaces a word directly
– like an icon for a rose instead of the word 'rose' – yet it takes people about 50 percent longer to
comprehend the emoji.

Variation and ambiguity

Emoji characters vary slightly between platforms within the limits in meaning defined by the
Unicode specification, as companies have tried to provide artistic presentations of ideas and
objects. For example, following an Apple tradition, the calendar emoji on Apple products always
shows July 17, the date in 2002 Apple announced its iCal calendar application for macOS. This
led some Apple product users to initially nickname July 17 "World Emoji Day". Other emoji
fonts show different dates or do not show a specific one.Some Apple emoji are very similar to
the SoftBank standard, since SoftBank was the first Japanese network on which the iPhone
launched. For example, U+1F483 💃 DANCER is female on Apple and SoftBank standards but
male or gender-neutral on others.Journalists have noted that the ambiguity of emoji has allowed
them to take on culture-specific meanings not present in the original glyphs. For example,
U+1F485 💅 NAIL POLISH has been described as being used in English-language communities
to signify "non-caring fabulousness" and "anything from shutting haters down to a sense of
accomplishment". Unicode manuals sometimes provide notes on auxiliary meanings of an object
to guide designers on how emoji may be used, for example noting that some users may expect
U+1F4BA 💺 SEAT to stand for "a reserved or ticketed seat, as for an airplane, train, or theater".

Controversial emoji

Some emoji have been involved in controversy due to their perceived meanings. Multiple arrests
and imprisonments have followed usage of pistol (U+1F52B 🔫 ), knife (U+1F5E1 🗡 ), and bomb
(U+1F4A3 💣 ) emoji in ways that authorities deemed credible threats.In the lead-up to the 2016
Summer Olympics, the Unicode Consortium considered proposals to add several Olympic-
related emoji, including medals and events such as handball and water polo. By October 2015,
these candidate emoji included "rifle" (U+1F946 🥆 ) and "modern pentathlon" (U+1F93B 🤻 ).
However, in 2016, Apple and Microsoft opposed these two emoji, and the characters were added
without emoji presentations, meaning that software is expected to render them in black-and-
white rather than color, and emoji-specific software such as onscreen keyboards will generally
not include them. In addition, while the original incarnations of the modern pentathlon emoji
depicted its five events, including a man pointing a gun, the final glyph contains a person riding
a horse, along with a laser pistol target in the corner.

On August 1, 2016, Apple announced that in iOS 10, the pistol emoji (U+1F52B 🔫 ) would be
changed from a realistic revolver to a water pistol. Conversely, the following day, Microsoft
pushed out an update to Windows 10 that changed its longstanding depiction of the pistol emoji
as a toy ray-gun to a real revolver. Microsoft stated that the change was made to bring the glyph
more in line with industry-standard designs and customer expectations. By 2018, most major
platforms such as Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Facebook, and Twitter had transitioned their
rendering of the pistol emoji to match Apple's water gun implementation. Apple's change of
depiction from a realistic gun to a toy gun was criticised by among others the editor of
Emojipedia, because it could lead to messages appearing differently to the receiver than the
sender had intended. Insider's Rob Price said it created the potential for "serious
miscommunication across different platforms", and asked "What if a joke sent from an Apple
user to a Google user is misconstrued because of differences in rendering? Or if a genuine threat
sent by a Google user to an Apple user goes unreported because it is taken as a joke?"The
eggplant (aubergine) emoji (U+1F346 🍆 ) has also seen controversy due to it being used, almost
solely in North America to represent a penis. Beginning in December 2014, the hashtag
#EggplantFridays began to rise to popularity on Instagram for use in marking photos featuring
clothed or unclothed penises. This became such a popular trend that beginning in April 2015,
Instagram disabled the ability to search for not only the #EggplantFridays tag, but also other
eggplant-containing hashtags, including simply #eggplant and #🍆.The peach emoji (U+1F351
🍑 ) has likewise been used as a euphemistic icon for buttocks, with a 2016 Emojipedia analysis
revealing that only seven percent of English language tweets with the peach emoji refer to the
actual fruit. In 2016, Apple attempted to redesign the emoji to less resemble buttocks. This was
met with fierce backlash in beta testing and Apple reversed its decision by the time it went live to
the public.In December 2017, a lawyer in Delhi, India, threatened to file a lawsuit against
WhatsApp for allowing use of the middle finger emoji (U+1F595 🖕 ) on the basis that the
company is "directly abetting the use of an offensive, lewd, obscene gesture" in violation of the
Indian Penal Code.

Emoji implementation
Early implementation in Japan

Various, often incompatible, character encoding schemes were developed by the different mobile
providers in Japan for their own emoji sets. For example, the extended Shift JIS representation
F797 is used for a convenience store (🏪) by SoftBank, but for a wristwatch (⌚️) by KDDI. All
three vendors also developed schemes for encoding their emoji in the Unicode Private Use Area:
DoCoMo, for example, used the range U+E63E through U+E757. Versions of iOS prior to 5.1
encoded emoji in the SoftBank private use area.

Unicode support considerations

Most, but not all, emoji are included in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP) of Unicode,
which is also used for ancient scripts, some modern scripts such as Adlam or Osage, and special-
use characters such as Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols. Some systems introduced prior to
the advent of Unicode emoji were only designed to support characters in the Basic Multilingual
Plane (BMP), on the assumption that non-BMP characters would rarely be encountered, although
failure to properly handle characters outside of the BMP precludes Unicode compliance.The
introduction of Unicode emoji created an incentive for vendors to improve their support for non-
BMP characters. The Unicode Consortium notes that "[b]ecause of the demand for emoji, many
implementations have upgraded their Unicode support substantially", also helping support for
minority languages that use those features.

Color support

Any operating system that supports adding additional fonts to the system can add an emoji-
supporting font. However, inclusion of colorful emoji in existing font formats requires dedicated
support for color glyphs. Not all operating systems have support for color fonts, so in these cases
emoji might have to be rendered as black-and-white line art or not at all. There are four different
formats used for multi-color glyphs in an SFNT font, not all of which are necessarily supported
by a given operating system library or software package such as a web browser or graphical
program. This means that color fonts may need to be supplied in several formats to be usable on
multiple operating systems, or in multiple applications.

Implementation by different platforms and vendors

Apple first introduced emoji to their desktop operating system with the release of OS X 10.7
Lion, in 2011. Users can view emoji characters sent through email and messaging applications,
which are commonly shared by mobile users, as well as any other application. Users can create
emoji symbols using the "Characters" special input panel from almost any native application by
selecting the "Edit" menu and pulling down to "Special Characters", or by the key combination
⌘ Command+⌥ Option+T. The emoji keyboard was first available in Japan with the release of
iPhone OS version 2.2 in 2008. The emoji keyboard was not officially made available outside of
Japan until iOS version 5.0. From iPhone OS 2.2 through to iOS 4.3.5 (2011), those outside
Japan could access the keyboard but had to use a third party app to enable it. Apple has revealed
that the "face with tears of joy" is the most popular emoji among English speaking Americans.
On second place is the "heart" emoji followed by the "Loudly Crying Face".An update for
Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 brought a subset of the monochrome Unicode set to
those operating systems as part of the Segoe UI Symbol font. As of Windows 8.1 Preview, the
Segoe UI Emoji font is included, which supplies full-color pictographs. The plain Segoe UI font
lacks emoji characters, whereas Segoe UI Symbol and Segoe UI Emoji include them. Emoji
characters are accessed through the onscreen keyboard's 😀 key, or through the physical
keyboard shortcut ⊞ Win+..

Facebook and Twitter replace all Unicode emoji used on their websites with their own custom
graphics. Prior to October 2017, Facebook had different sets for the main site and for its
Messenger service, where only the former provides complete coverage. Messenger now uses
Apple emoji on iOS, and the main Facebook set elsewhere. Facebook reactions are only partially
compatible with standard emoji.

Modifiers
Emoji versus text presentation

Unicode defines variation sequences for many of its emoji to indicate their desired presentation.

Emoji characters can have two main kinds of presentation:

an emoji presentation, with colorful and perhaps whimsical shapes, even animated

a text presentation, such as black & white

Specifying the desired presentation is done by following the base emoji with either U+FE0E
VARIATION SELECTOR-15 (VS15) for text or U+FE0F VARIATION SELECTOR-16
(VS16) for emoji-style.

Skin color

Five symbol modifier characters were added with Unicode 8.0 to provide a range of skin tones
for human emoji. These modifiers are called EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-1-2, -3,
-4, -5, and -6 (U+1F3FB–U+1F3FF): 🏻 🏼 🏽 🏾 🏿. They are based on the Fitzpatrick scale for
classifying human skin color. Human emoji that are not followed by one of these five modifiers
should be displayed in a generic, non-realistic skin tone, such as bright yellow (■), blue (■), or
gray (■). Non-human emoji (like U+26FD ⛽ FUEL PUMP) are unaffected by the Fitzpatrick
modifiers.

As of Unicode 14.0, Fitzpatrick modifiers can be used with 129 human emoji spread across
seven blocks: Dingbats, Emoticons, Miscellaneous Symbols, Miscellaneous Symbols and
Pictographs, Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs, Transport and Map Symbols, and Symbols
and Pictographs Extended-A.The following table shows both the Unicode characters and the
open-source "Twemoji" images, designed by Twitter:

Joining

Implementations may use a zero-width joiner (ZWJ) between multiple emoji to make them
behave like a single, unique emoji character. For example, the sequence U+1F468 👨 MAN,
U+200D ZWJ, U+1F469 👩 WOMAN, U+200D ZWJ, U+1F467 👧 GIRL (👨‍👩‍👧) could be
displayed as a single emoji depicting a family with a man, a woman, and a girl if the
implementation supports it. Systems that do not support it would ignore the ZWJs, displaying
only the three base emoji in order (👨👩👧).

Unicode previously maintained a catalog of emoji ZWJ sequences that were supported on at least
one commonly available platform. The consortium has since switched to documenting sequences
that are recommended for general interchange (RGI). These are clusters that emoji fonts are
expected to include as part of the standard.

Unicode blocks
Unicode 14.0 represents emoji using 1,404 characters spread across 24 blocks, of which 26 are
Regional Indicator Symbols that combine in pairs to form flag emoji, and 12 (#, * and 0–9) are
base characters for keycap emoji sequences:637 of the 768 code points in the Miscellaneous
Symbols and Pictographs block are considered emoji. 242 of the 256 code points in the
Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs block are considered emoji. All of the 88 code points in
the Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A block are considered emoji. All of the 80 code points
in the Emoticons block are considered emoji. 104 of the 117 code points in the Transport and
Map Symbols block are considered emoji. 83 of the 256 code points in the Miscellaneous
Symbols block are considered emoji. 33 of the 192 code points in the Dingbats block are
considered emoji.

Additional emoji can be found in the following Unicode blocks: Arrows (8 code points
considered emoji), Basic Latin (12), CJK Symbols and Punctuation (2), Enclosed Alphanumeric
Supplement (41), Enclosed Alphanumerics (1), Enclosed CJK Letters and Months (2), Enclosed
Ideographic Supplement (15), General Punctuation (2), Geometric Shapes (8), Geometric Shapes
Extended (13), Latin-1 Supplement (2), Letterlike Symbols (2), Mahjong Tiles (1),
Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows (7), Miscellaneous Technical (18), Playing Cards (1), and
Supplemental Arrows-B (2).

Additions

Some vendors, most notably Microsoft, Samsung and HTC, add emoji presentation to some other
existing Unicode characters or coin their own ZWJ sequences.

Microsoft displays all Mahjong tiles (U+1F000‥2B, not just U+1F004 🀄 MAHJONG TILE
RED DRAGON) and alternative card suits (U+2661 ♡ , U+2662 ♢ , U+2664 ♤ , U+2667 ♧ ) as
emoji. They also support additional pencils (U+270E ✎ , U+2710 ✐ ) and a heart-shaped bullet
(U+2765 ❥ ).

While only U+261D ☝ is officially an emoji, Microsoft and Samsung add the other three
directions as well (U+261C ☜ , U+261E ☞ , U+261F ☟ ).
Both vendors pair the standard checked ballot box emoji U+2611 ☑ with its crossed variant
U+2612 ☒ , but only Samsung also has the empty ballot box U+2610 ☐ .

Samsung almost completely covers the rest of the Miscellaneous Symbols block (U+2600‥FF) as
emoji, which includes Chess pieces, game die faces, some traffic sign as well as genealogical and
astronomical symbols for instance.

HTC supports most additional pictographs from the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs
(U+1F300‥5FF) and Transport and Map Symbols (U+1F680‥FF) blocks. Some of them are also
shown as emoji on Samsung devices.

The open source projects Emojidex and Emojitwo are trying to cover all of these extensions
established by major vendors.

In popular culture
The 2009 film Moon featured a robot named GERTY who communicates using a neutral-toned
synthesized voice together with a screen showing emoji representing the corresponding
emotional content.

In 2014, the Library of Congress acquired an emoji version of Herman Melville's Moby Dick
created by Fred Benenson.

A musical called Emojiland premiered at Rockwell Table & Stage in Los Angeles in May 2016,
after selected songs were presented at the same venue in 2015.

In October 2016, the Museum of Modern Art acquired the original collection of emoji distributed
by NTT Docomo in 1999.

In November 2016, the first emoji-themed convention, Emojicon, was held in San Francisco.

In March 2017, the first episode of the fifth season of Samurai Jack featured alien characters who
communicate in emoji.

In April 2017, the Doctor Who episode "Smile" featured nanobots called Vardy, which
communicate through robotic avatars that use emoji (without any accompanying speech output)
and are sometimes referred to by the time travelers as "Emojibots".

On July 28, 2017, Sony Pictures Animation released The Emoji Movie, a 3D computer animated
movie featuring the voices of Patrick Stewart, Christina Aguilera, Sofía Vergara, Anna Faris, T.
J. Miller, and other notable actors and comedians.

On September 3, 2021 Drake (musician) released his sixth studio album, Certified Lover Boy
with album cover art featuring twelve emoji of pregnant women in varying clothing colours, hair
colors and skin tones.
See also
Pictograph

Emojipedia

iConji

Kaomoji

Emojli

Hieroglyphics

Blob emoji

Notes
References
Further reading
Pardes, Arielle (February 1, 2018). "The WIRED Guide to Emoji". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028.

External links
Unicode Technical Report #51: Unicode emoji

The Unicode FAQ – Emoji & Dingbats

Emoji Symbols – the original proposals for encoding of Emoji symbols as Unicode characters

Background data for Unicode proposal

emojitracker – list of most popularly used emoji on the Twitter platform; updated in real-time