World Emoji Day 2021: History, significance and all you need to know about new emojis on the cards

The first emoji was created by an engineer, Shigetaka Kurita, in Japanese mobile operating company back in 1999 (Photo: Pixabay)

World Emoji Day 2021: Can you imagine sending texts to someone without using emojis these days? Hard to say. Especially now when texting has become a part of our daily routine, not using emojis while chatting with someone could feel dull and boring. Emoji helps us communicate feelings, words, expressions which are hard to put in words or which could otherwise be not formulated or put in words. Infact, emojis have made communication much better and easier on social media platforms– Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, where we can’t always respond to people in words or sentences. This day marks the objective to promote the usage of emojis in our day-to-day conversations.

World Emoji Day: History and Significance

The first emoji was created by an engineer, Shigetaka Kurita, in Japanese mobile operating company back in 1999. Shigetaka created some 176 emojis for the release of a mobile integrated service i-mode. Unicode finally approved the standardised usage of emoji in 2010. It was only after then, global giants like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter started creating their own sets of emojis. In 2014, the founder of Emojipedia, Jeremy Burge announced that July 17 will be recognised as World Emoji Day every year.

The most used emojis

As per the blog published by the World Economic Forum last year, emojis have been used nearly 5 billion times every day on social media platforms Facebook and FB messenger alone. It is a huge number. The report also states that in 1995 the number of emojis present were just 76. By 2020, that number has grown exponentially to 3,136. Some of the emojis were used more than the others. This emoji, crying with laughter, was the most used emoji on social platforms Twitter and Facebook. On Instagram, the most used emoji was a heart emoji.

New emojis on the way!

Yes! You heard it right. After a slight delay due to the ongoing pandemic, new sets of emojis are on their way for Android and iOS users. The draft list for the new emojis have been announced yesterday, July 16 for Emoji 14.0 update. The list includes emojis like–saluting face, melting smiley face, biting lip, pregnant people, multicolor handshakes among others. The final list of emojis is expected to be finalised by Unicode in September and is scheduled to be rolled out to different devices in 2022.

‘Soundemoji’ soon

The other day Facebook announced that it will be soon rolling out emojis with sound on its messaging platform–Facebook messenger “Soundemoji”. The company also stated that Soundemoji will let its users send short sound clips, such as clapping, drumoll, and evil laughter, while chatting on Facebook Messenger.

Who approves the emojis?
The final approval for the emojis that we use daily comes by the Unicode Consortium after which the emojis are published and widely used by mobile operating systems–Android and iOS users on their respective platforms. The Unicode Consortium (California based non-profit organisation) has members (Netflix, Apple, facebook, Google, Tinder) who vote and submit their take on the emojis awaiting approval.