The Japanese word emoji literally means ‘picture character’ (e translates as ‘picture’ and moji as ‘character’ in Japanese). Originating on Japanese mobile phones in 1997, emoji became increasingly popular worldwide after 2010 when they were added to several mobile operating systems. They are now considered to be a large part of popular culture. In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries named the Face with Tears of Joy emoji as the ‘Word of the Year’.
Other Japanese carriers quickly followed Docomo’s lead and developed their own versions of the pictographs, and since then, emoji have exploded ??. In 2007, the Unicode Consortium, a Silicon Valley nonprofit that standardizes software and code across platforms, began to standardized emoji as well so they would appear more or less the same across the internet, regardless of what type of phone, mobile network, computer, or website emoji were accessed from. Emoji became a staple in the U.S. when an emoji keyboard was added to Apple iPhones by 2011.
Picture Credit : Google
