I have a confession to make: I love emojis.
I usually have to physically restrain myself from putting an emoji after every sentence I write when I text. If it weren’t considered unprofessional to include them in my emails to professors, I would do that as well.
Emojis help to portray the tone of a message. With the technological and cultural shift from calling on the phone to texting as the primary mode of communication, we have lost out on the added context of body language, facial expression and vocal inflection in messages. Simply looking at plain blue and green text makes it hard to tell what the other person is feeling.
Emojis can help with that. Shigeta Kurita created them in Japan in 1999. In 2010 the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit organization that determines how text is represented across computers, added emojis to their code so that they could be standardized across devices and languages. In 2011, Apple added an emoji keyboard, which made it easier to send emojis, as previously people had to copy and paste them into messages from separate apps.
In 2014 the effort began to make emojis more inclusive, such as adding more ethnically diverse food, female professionals and an option to change an emoji’s skin color. As of September, there are 3,790 emojis in the Unicode Standard which includes the previously mentioned changes. The Unicode Consortium has an emoji subcommittee that actively approves concepts for new emojis.
Emojipedia stores information about emojis. You can learn the official names of emojis, when they were created and compare their designs on different phones (Apple, Samsung, Android, etc).
I use emojis to distinguish between when I’m being sarcastic and when I’m being sincere. They supplement my words or stand alone as a message, sometimes even as the punchline of a joke. If my friend sends me a confusing message, all I need to do is send a confused emoji and they’ll know to explain.
Granted, today some of the emoji faces don’t clearly express one simple emotion such as the “melting face,” “face with spiral eyes” or “star-struck” but I find that my generation has assigned meaning to them anyway and that we can all somehow understand it. Another example is how we collectively decided that the “rolling on the floor laughing” emoji is actually sarcastic, and the “loudly crying face” replaced it.
The code may have been written for us but we have given it its own meaning. Arielle Pardes, former senior writer at Wired, lovingly refers to emojis as “the first language born of the digital world.” They transcend traditional language barriers as a unique form of communication.
Artificial intelligence has also picked up on the fact that emojis help show emotion. In my first-year seminar class we were experimenting with Microsoft’s Copilot and the chatbot was including emojis after every thought without being prompted to. I have seen ChatGPT send emojis too. The idea of chatting with a computer rather than a human may seem impersonal to some, so it’s possible that chatboxes use emojis to seem more human and form a connection.
Emojis also serve as digital decorations. They are bright, colorful and fun to look at like ornaments on a tree. They breathe and personality life into text, like when I wish people happy birthday and include celebratory emojis.
The first thing I look for when I update my phone are new emojis. The pink heart was one I waited for for years because there were hearts in all of the other colors of the rainbow. Other times new emojis are added that I didn’t realize I was missing in my life, like the “face holding back tears,” which I immediately add to my vocabulary.
I also love how Apple creates emoji easter eggs where emojis incorporate the smaller version of other emojis. For example, the “shallow pan” has a drumstick in it, the shortcake has a strawberry on top, the juice box has an apple on it, and so on.
Overall, life would be so boring without emojis. If you’re feeling inspired and have a great idea for a new emoji, Unicode always accepts new submissions.
