World Emoji Day: History, Significance, All You Need To Know

Emojis have over the years become a mode of communication. People use emojis to express or communicate their feelings, reactions, or things which they cannot put into words. Those who find typing messages a tiring task resort to emojis for communication. 

Emojis have indeed made our communication a little easier on digital platforms like Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter. Every year on July 17, people across the globe celebrate World Emoji Day. The main objective of the day is to promote the usage of emojis in our conversations.

Every year, a list of emojis is published and approved by the Unicode Consortium. Once the approval is given and the emojis are published, mobile operating systems like Android and iOS introduce them on their respective platforms. Unicode consortium has a set of members who vote and submit their opinion on the emojis that come for approval. These members are Netflix, Apple, Facebook, Google and Tinder, to name a few.

Back in 1999, the first emoji was created by an engineer who worked in a Japanese mobile operating company. Shigetaka Kurita created 176 emojis for the release of a mobile integrated service i-mode. Later, in 2010, Unicode finally standardised the usage of emoji. After which, global brands like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter started creating their own versions of emojis.

The Unicode 6.0 is the largest release of emojis yet. Consisting of 994 characters, it included emoticons of families, hearts, animals, country, flags, clothes, clocks, food, and city images.

World Emoji Day: Significance

In 2014, the founder of Emojipedia, Jeremy Burge announced that July 17 will be observed as World Emoji Day. Another reason to celebrate this day on July 17 is that the ‘calendar’ emoji depicts the date as its image.

Emojis released last year

Last year, over 110 new emojis, including smiling face with a tear, Transgender Flag, Bubble Tea, and bottle-feeding parents were added by Unicode Consortium in Emoji 13.0. All global payers, including Apple, are aware of the popularity of emoji features. In the latest release of iOS 14, the tech giant has added an emoji search to the keyboard.

July 17, 2021