FROM TO : HOW EMOJIS TOOK OVER

1982

Scott E Fahlman, at Carnegie Mellon University, suggested using :-) and :-( to mark posts that were not to be taken seriously. Emoticons were born.

1999

Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita developed 176 manga-inspired images for mobile service NTT Docomo. Japanese users loved them.

2007

Every company had their own emojis and chaos ruled. Google asked the Unicode Consortium to recognise emojis and create common codes for them.

2008

Apple released emojis for the smartphone in Japan. Other platforms followed, but sending an emoji from Apple to Android, still meant the recipient got blank boxes.

2009

Gmail added emojis. Fred Beneson retold Herman Melville’s Moby Dick entirely in emojis. People started to wonder if a new language was being born.

2010

Yay! Unicode finally standardised emojis so they appeared similar across all formats. A set of 722 emojis – emotions, poo, families, hearts, animals, clothes, food, city images, clocks, and country flags – were unleashed upon the world.

2011

Apple’s iOS 5 added an emoji keyboard. Other platforms did so too and emojis became convenient and compatible to share.

2013

Facebook got emojis for chat. Emoji entered the Oxford English Dictionary. An Emoji Art & Design Show featured emoji-themed work from over 20 artists.

2014

The first World Emoji Day was celebrated on July 17, picked because it is the default date on the iOS calendar emoji.

2015

Skin-tone emojis were released. Tears Of Joy emoji was Oxford dictionary’s word of the year, for best reflecting ‘the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015’.

2016

New York’s Museum of Modern Art incorporated Docomo’s 176 emojis in its design heritage archive. Emojicon, a conference to make emojis more representative, was set up.

2017

Ugh, the awful, cheesy Emoji Movie made no one laugh.

2018

About 92% online users use emojis. There are 2,789 emojis in the Unicode list, including special ones for Star Wars, FIFA and other time-bound events. Off Broadway, Emojiland: A Textistential Musical, is a tale of emojis inside a teen’s phone.