Emoji Timeline

Fred Benenson launches Emoji Dick, a project that aims to translate 10 000 sentences from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick into emojis. Benenson enlists over 800 people through Mechanical Turk, where you pay anywhere from a couple of cents to a couple of dollars for humans to complete defined tasks, that in the end spends over 3,795,980 seconds to write the book. Benenson raises the money to pay his army of translators via the crowdsourcing platform Kickstarter.

“I’m interested in the phenomenon of how our language, communications, and culture are influenced by digital technology. Emoji are either a low point or a high point in that story, so I felt I could confront a lot of our shared anxieties about the future of human expression (see: Twitter or text messages) by forcing a great work of literature through such a strange new filter”, explains Fred Benenson on the Kickstarter.

#EmojiArtHistory is a Twitter hashtag associated with reinterpretations of famous artworks throughout history through only using emojis. The idea for the hashtag came from a Tumblr post submitted by ladiesupfront which featured four iPhone screenshots of text messages sent from a friend who tried to recreate artistic masterpieces with emoji characters.

A couple of weeks later, Brooklyn-based artist Man Bartlett reblogged the photoset, leading him to use the hashtag #EmojiArtHistory for the first time with an emoji of a man and a gun to represent Chris Burden’s 1971 conceptual performance piece, Shoot.

Jeremy Burge creates Emojipedia, an emoji reference website. Emojipedia documents changes to emoji symbols and their meanings in the Unicode Standard, and has been called “the world’s number one resource on emoji”.

The word “emoji” is added to the Oxford Dictionaries. There’s however no plan to add any emojis themselves to the dictionary.

“With influences ranging from technology to fashion, there is something for everyone in the update,” the organization said in a blog post.

The Emoji Art & Design Show is on display December 12-21 in New York and features original work from 20+ artists. “An examination of the emoji zeitgeist”, the show explains on it’s website (Archived). “The works presented cover a wide range of mediums from digital prints, sculptures, video and performance art, tackling themes such as emotional ambiguity, symbology, and visual communication.“

Author Maris Kreizman of the literary blog Slaughterhouse 90210 sent out a tweet suggesting the publishing industry, instead of using cliched adjectives should allow blurbs to be done in emoji form. The publishing firm Random House took inspiration from this and created the hashtag #emojireads challenging Twitter users to come up with book plots with only emojis.

According to an American study by the dating website Match.com singles who use emojis have more sex than those who don’t. Their report also claims that women who use kiss emoji have a tendency to easier get an orgasm with a partner.

SwiftKey analyzes more than one billion pieces of emoji data across a wide range of categories to learn how speakers of 16 different languages and regions use emoji. Among the findings in the report were:

• French​ use​ four times​ as many heart emoji than other languages, and it’s the only language for which a ‘smiley’ is not #1
• Flowers and plants emoji are used at four times the average rate by ​Arabic​ speakers
• Russian​ speakers use ​ three times​  as much romantic emoji than the average
• Australia’s​  emoji use characterizes it as the land of vice & indulgence, using ​ double​  the average amount of alcohol­themed emoji, 65% more drug emoji than average and leading for both junk food and holiday emoji

“Emoji is the new lingua franca”, says journalist Joanna Stern when she decides to write an article for Wall Street Journal with as many emojis as she can.

A French ad, created by Paris based agency BETC, for fast-food chain McDonalds shows a city full of people going about their daily lives. But instead of human heads, they all have giant emoji heads. The ad ends with the tagline “Venez comme vous êtes,” which translates to “Come as you are”.

When Facebook launched their emoji-esque "Reactions", USA Today decided to use them on its own front page by adding them next to their headlines. The stunt was heavily criticised, arguing that the icons felt like they were trying to reflect how the reader should feel about the news, which blurs the line of journalistic neutrality.

David Callaway, editor-in-chief, USA Today, responded with: "My feeling (as editor-in-chief) is that a billion FB users may soon start using these to share stories—all kinds of stories—which of course is Facebook's intention. Social media and its icons are becoming a dominant form of communication in our world. We wanted to show what they would be like if transferred to print."

Zubi Advertising, a Hispanic Marketing agency composed of Hispanic employees based in Miami, USA, releases Latino Emoji. A keyboard app with over 250 latino inspired emoji stickers.

Latino Emoji has people, food, sayings and popular culture emojis from Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Venezuela. For example, Colombia has a key emoji because the Spanish word for key, “llave” is Colombian for “dude!”. Puerto Rico has the coquí frog, Argentina an emoji of the current pope and Cuba has a mojito.

The set also includes graphic takes on common phrases used in some of our countries - such as a mango sitting on a rice bowl ("arroz con mango," which means a total mess) or a head of lettuce with a face on it ("cara de lechuga" means someone is pretty shameless).

To make sure they really typified the culture Zubi picked designers from each country to design their country’s emojis.

"We realized there was a need for emojis to speak to the diversity of our community. Our food, our slang our cultures are different from one country to another. /---/ We tried to capture how Hispanics use a lot of expressions that have double meanings. Our slang is humorous and exaggerated. We’re dramatic and charming and passionate. We wanted to graphically capture that. /---/ At the end of the day it's a form of communication. And if you don’t have a way of communicating that reflects how you truly speak, you’re being limited."
Iván Calle, Executive Creative Director at Zubi to NBC News

The app is downloaded 10 000 times on launch day alone in over 100 countries.

*Latino Emoji were available to download from iTunes and Google Play but has since been discontinued and the website shut down.

Apple announces that in iOS 10 the gun emoji will change it’s appearance from a realistic revolver to a water pistol. Conversely, at the same time, Microsoft decides with it’s latest update to Windows 10 to change the design of their gun emoji from a toy ray-gun to a realistic revolver. Later in 2016, ironically Apple, Microsoft and Google voted against including a rifle emoji to celebrate the Summer Olympics’ shooting events.

Researchers at the University of Michigan and Peking University analyze 427 million messages from nearly 4 million smartphone users in 212 countries and regions to see if emoji use was universal or differed based on user location and culture. They used a popular input method app—Kika Emoji Keyboard—made available in 60 languages. The team’s results are believed to be the first large-scale analysis of emoji usage.

“Emojis are everywhere. They are becoming the ubiquitous language that bridges everyone across different cultures,” says Wei Ai, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan School of Information.

In line with perceptions of the culture, the romantic French embrace icons associated with hearts, while users from other countries prefer emojis related to faces. Countries where ties between individuals are integrated and tight, like Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Colombia, use more emojis expressing sadness, anger, and negative feelings. People in long-term orientation societies who tend to have values that center on the future like French, Hungarians, and Ukrainians—are less likely to use negative emojis than those living in societies with low long-term orientation like Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Israel.

NTT DoCoMo’s original set of 176 emojis, created by Shigetaka Kurita, is added to the collection of Museum of Modern Arts (MoMA) in New York, USA. In december the same year the museum opens an installation about the evolution of emojis and their cultural impact.

"Shigetaka Kurita’s emoji are powerful manifestations of the capacity of design to alter human behavior. The design of a chair dictates our posture; so, too, does the format of electronic communication shape our voice. MoMA’s collection is filled with examples of design innovations that radically altered our world, from telephones to personal computers to the @ symbol. Today’s emoji (the current Unicode set numbers nearly 1,800) have evolved far beyond Kurita’s original 176 designs for NTT DOCOMO. However, the DNA for today’s set is clearly present in Kurita’s humble, pixelated, seminal emoji." / Paul Galloway (MoMA Architecture & Design Collection Specialist)

Today Translations, a translation firm based in London, puts out an ad for the world’s first emoji translator specialist to help them meet the translation challenges posed by “the world’s fastest-growing language.” A need has risen since text messages more and more are being used as evidence in court cases. The software being used isn’t sensitive enough to understand the many cultural differences in usage and interpretation of the expressive pictograms.

In the episode “Smile” (S10E02) of the British cult tv-series Doctor Who the eponymous Doctor and his companion discovers an alien colony inhabited by robots who only communicate through emojis.

The Empire State Building in New York City, USA, is lit up in yellow in celebration of World Emoji Day, July 17th.

The iconic Manhattan building installed in 2012 a computer-controlled LED light system that will power the celebration and turn the skyscraper into a beacon of "emoji yellow". The city frequently uses the building's state-of-the-art lighting system to mark special occasions and celebrations.

She is only 12-years old when Detroit rapper Brooklyn Queen releases her single Emoji. The music video has to date (February 2021) over 57 million views on Youtube.

A study published in “Social Psychological and Personality Science” claims that the inclusion of smiley emojis in work emails doesn't increase perceptions of warmth and actually decreases perceptions of competence. The study also shows that there's a glimmer of sexism in emoji usage. It revealed that when the gender of the email sender was unknown, recipients were more likely to presume that an email which included a smiley icon was sent by a woman.

The non-profit organization Plan International writes in a study about menstruation that there is still a huge taboo surrounding it and that most women aren’t comfortable talking about the subject. Half of the women between 18-34 in the study feel that it would be easier to talk to their partner about menstruation if there was an emoji for it.

They therefore launch a competition in May where they ask people to vote on five different period emoji designs, and between the UK and Australia over 54,600 people voted in total. Over 18,700 voted for the pants emoji to be added to keyboards worldwide. It was submitted as a proposal to the Unicode Consortium, asking them to add it as an emoji standard in 2018.

Beginning on January 1st Ivorian artist and student O’Plerou Grebet start posting an Africa related emoji every day till the end of the year on Instagram. Grebet taught himself how to create emojis after getting fed up of seeing just poverty images of Africa. He wanted to depict the beauty in the everyday lives of African people.

“My idea was to create emojis so Africans can have emojis they relate to.”

In December 2018, he incorporated all 365 emojis from his project into an app which he titled 'Zouzoukwa' which means "image" in the Bete language spoken in Ivory Coast. (In December 2023, the app is no longer available)

On World Emoji Day the new musical Emojiland premieres Off-Broadway. The show marks the first time emojis have been adapted into a long-form narrative and is the brain child of husband-and-wife duo Keith (book, music, lyrics) and Laura Harrison (book). It was partly financed by a Kickstarter campaign.

Emojiland tells the story of an emoji civilization contained within a teenager's smartphone. When the phone falls behind a dresser, the inhabitants of Emojiland must figure out how to save themselves before the battery runs out and their universe shuts down, lost forever.

In July, Facebook and Instagram updates the Facebook Community Standards regarding permissible sexual expression on the social media platforms. Under the new terms using “Suggestive Elements” such as “contextually specific and commonly sexual emojis or emoji strings” isn’t allowed anymore and may result in a user’s account being flagged or removed.

The Facebook Community Standards doesn’t name which emojis specifically but the eggplant, sweat drop and peach emojis are probably included. Facebook and Instagram won’t censor “suggestive elements” on their own, however. They must meet a combination of criteria to be subject to removal, and be a part of an implicit or indirect sexual solicitation.

“Certain emojis will only be removed from Facebook and Instagram if they are used alongside a request for nude imagery, sex or sexual partners, or sex chat conversations. We aren’t removing simply the emojis.” / Stephanie Otway, Facebook

As a side project, Enric Moreu creates Emoji Trends by using a Twitter scrape of around 800 GB of tweets containing emojis.

Enric wanted a "language agnostic" way to see what was happening around the world by creating charts of how often different emojis were used. His goal isn't that the charts are to be informative, but rather that they should trigger people's curiosity.

I don't intend to prove any point in this project, I think it's just funny to see people wondering why people were tweeting a snake emoji.

Users on WeChat, the Chinese messaging app, evades censors by translating a viral interview about covid-19 from the March edition of the local state-run magazine, People, into emojis. The interview is with Ai Fen, the director of the emergency department of Wuhan Central Hospital. Ai was the first doctor to pass along information about the then–mystery illness which become known as covid-19 or the coronavirus.

The censors keep deleting the story so the users started to translate it in different ways, one of them using emojis.

As part of a school assignment designer Allwin Williams creates the project "Sentiment of Emojis", which visualises the real-time emoji sentiment of Twitter using data from Matthew Rothenberg's Emoji Tracker.

A lot of sentiments are expressed through emojis and they are easier to decode, for humans as well as computers.This is an exploration on filtering out only emojis with sentiments and labelling them as positive and negative. This shows the data from the time you open the page as well as from a few years back. The goal is to try to visualise sentiments from emojis from around the world in real-time.

In March 2021 I launch the website Emoji Resear.ch.

As more and more research is made about emojis I felt that there was a need for a place where all this could be easily found. The website collects information and links to emoji research and put it in one place that could easily be searched. In essence, Emoji Resear.ch is a small, and very specific, search engine.

Emoji Resear.ch doesn’t host any of the research on the website itself. Instead we collect the basic information, including any existing abstract, and provide a link to the actual research paper or report.

After England's football team loses the final of the European Championships, the football players Bukayo Saka, Jadon Sancho and Marcus Rashford was subjected to racist abuse online after their penalty shots were saved by the Italian goal keeper. Within minutes racists flooded Saka’s Instagram account with monkey emojis.

“There is a long history of Black people being referred to as monkeys or apes by white people”, explained Jeremy Burge on Emojipedias blog. ”This is rooted in white supremacy. It's dehumanizing and it's racist. It's impossible to separate the monkey emojis from this long-standing racist trope when they're used to disparage, insult, and abuse Black people.”

Some calls went out for the banning of the monkey emoji to prevent racists from abusing it, but as Jeremy Burge continued:

“The monkey emoji isn't racist in isolation, but it can be in many contexts. Banning the monkey emoji isn't the answer. Banning racists from social media platforms is.”

In February Queen Elizabeth became the first British monarch to celebrate a Platinum Jubilee, marking 70 years on the throne. One week ahead of the celebrations to begin in earnest in June the Royal Family announces a special Jubilee “emoji” featuring a crown-wearing corgi called PJ.

Corgis have been synonymous with the Queen, 96. During her reign The Queen has owned more than 30 corgis.

Even though the British Royal Family calls the dog image an emoji, it is technically a sticker, not an emoji.

Twitter CEO Elon Musk announces via tweet that messages to the company’s press email (press@twitter.com), which have gone unanswered for months, would now receive a “💩” (poop emoji) in an automatic reply.

When Musk took over the social media platform in late October 2022, following a $44 billion deal, Twitter’s press team effectively stopped replying to emails. This was not unprecedented as Musk, who has a history of hostility towards journalists, got rid of Tesla’s press department back in 2020.

This isn't the first time the billionaire has used the poop emoji as a response, which prompts the British newspaper The Guardian to pose the question in its coverage of the new policy:

“Why, exactly, does a 51-year-old man appear to be stuck in Freud’s anal stage?“