Since the 2010s, the characters known as emojis have pretty much evolved into their own language on our phones and computers. But the predecessors of the \u201cpicture characters\u201d we know and use so regularly today are older than you\u2019d expect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Before emojis, there were emoticons, facial expressions made with punctuation marks. The first emoticons appeared in an issue of Puck magazine, all the way back in 1881. The magazine published four \u201cfaces\u201d\u2014conveying joy, melancholy, indifference, and astonishment\u2014and called them \u201ctypographical art.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They were first used as a way of communicating emotions online in 1982. When it became difficult for people to tell the difference between jokes and serious posts on a Carnegie Mellon University digital message board, faculty member named Scott Fahlman came up with a solution: add the symbol \ud83d\ude42 to denote humorous posts, and add the symbol \ud83d\ude41 to serious ones. In his announcement about this proposal, he even specified that readers should \u201cread it sideways.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, what about emojis, the little pictures that now make texting so fun? Those were created in 1998 by Shigetaka Kurita, an engineer at the Japanese phone company, NTT Docomo. He was working on a way for customers to communicate through icons. The result was a set of 176 icons he called emoji. The name combines two Japanese words: \u201ce\u201d (picture) and \u201cmoji\u201d (character). Kurita says that he drew inspiration for his emojis from manga, Chinese characters, and international signs for bathrooms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n