World Emoji Day 2022: History & Significance

Today, we use emojis in our everyday communication. They have become a well-liked and most preferred method of expressing sentiments to those on the other side of our screens. Thanks to emojis, things that were previously hard to convey in writing have now gotten simpler, and on top of that, emojis have increased everyone's interest in texting significantly. In that spirit, every year on July 17, World Emoji Day is celebrated to encourage people to use emojis on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and WhatsApp. So, let's dig into the history of this great invention and know how the world of emojis came into being!

How the World of Emoji Started

In the year 1999, a Japanese engineer named Shigetaka Kurita (an employee of Japanese telecom corporation NTT Docomo) created the first emoji in the world. Initially, these icons were known as emoticons but later, he chose the word “emoji”, as it roughly translates to "picture word" in Japanese; thus clearly signifying the meaning. At that time, he produced 176 emojis for the company as they were launching its new mobile integrated service.

For a very long time, this digital creation was under the shade, but in 2007, a Google software internationalisation recognised the value of emojis. The team later filed a petition to the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit organisation to uphold text standards across computers.

Eventually, in 2010, Unicode finally standardised the use of emojis as smartphone users around the globe increased rapidly. Since then, well-known corporates like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter have been developing their own emojis. Every year these companies send a list of emojis and the Unicode Consortium releases the ones which they find appropriate for the digital world.

Why we Celebrate the Invention of Emojis

The idea for the World Emoji Day celebration was brought up by the founder of Emojipedia that is Jeremy Burge. He declared July 17 to be World Emoji Day in 2014 and every year since then, it has been commemorated around the globe.

To make the Emoji Day celebrations more memorable, Jeremy released a calendar emoji using ‘July 17’ as its picture. However, social media platforms like Whatsapp and Facebook have different dates which represent the beginning of these emojis.

To sum up, emojis have made our communication easier and it's time to appreciate the effort that individuals went through to make it happen. This year, send your close ones happy World Emoji Day greetings and spread the joys of these digital expressions.