The Story Behind the Rise of Emojis and their Family

• The use of Emoji can be traced back to the language of the term; Japanese
• In the terminology, 'e' means picture while 'moji' means written character
• The word Emoji won the award for 'Oxford Word of the Year 2015'

July 30, 2017: Emojis are added entertainment to our conversations. Living subtly in our smartphones, the Emojis have come a long way from once where they started.

The first use of Emoji was in Japan. Emoji is a Japanese term where 'e' means picture and 'moji' means written character when translated into English. The popular characters emerged in smartphones before coming to social platforms.

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In the 1990s, there was only a total of 172. People loved and encouraged them right away. However, the technology at the time did not support them. Communication issues persisted even as Emojis became widely popular. Among the different operating software, a consistent emoji was never established.

Emojis were given hope when they were adopted by The Unicode Consortium. The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit company from the Silicon Valley. But, Unicode needs to be convinced that a particular emoji is needed. A certain guarantee of their popularity has to be estimated. Moreover, they should be unique and not specific to few number of people.

As of May 2016, 1624 official Emojis exist on multiple platforms. From Japanese nationalism, Emojis have become global citizens used in different countries. Emojis represent the diversity that exists in the global village.

Various stereotypes have been exhibited through these tiny little friends. There have even been social movements criticizing the absence of equality, after which additional emojis were created. Now all genders and communities are represented in all aspects of life. Professions, sports and other activities are gender expressed and multicultural.

Unicode standards provide the Emojis with a 'glyph', or a unique code. The expression is consistent throughout platforms, however, the final presentation of the emoji is entirely in the hands of the platform. For Example, the laughing emoji is different for Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Android, Google and more. The basic expression of laughing is expressed in different ways.

Today, Emojis stand universal. Even in barriers to communication such as language, a simple Emoji is powerful enough to dictate the entire message. Emoji won the award for 'Oxford Word of the Year 2015' and it was the first time that a picture character won the award.

– Prepared by Saksham Narula of NewsGram. Twitter: @Saksham2394