World Emoji Day: Expressing emotions on social media
Avya Mathur
Ahmedabad: They are like photographs or cartoons that go with the text in print media. Emoji enliven content on social media.
World Emoji Day (July 17) celebrates the invention of emojis to express different emotions and is also used to announce the birth of new emojis.
An emoji is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram, and smiley often used in electronic messages and web pages. Its primary function is to fill in emotional cues missing from typed conversation or content.
Emojis help effectively communicate expressions signifying feelings and emotions as reactions through a written text on social media.
According to a recent survey, using emojis positively affects mental health and also makes a person friendlier. Younger generations find it easier to express themselves through emojis than communicate in writing.
The Emoji Day is observed annually after the founder of Emojipedia, Jeremy Burge, announced July 17 as World Emoji Day in the year 2014.
A Japanese engineer, Shigetaka Kurita, created the first emoji in the world. He invented 176 emojis for mobile service in the year 1999.
However, it was only after Unicode officially registered and standardized emojis in 2010 that global brands like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Whatsapp, and Twitter released their versions.
The largest emojis are by Unicode 6.0 that comprises 994 characters and includes family, animals, countries, flags, clothes, food, clocks, weathers, heart emoticons, etc.
A list of emojis is published and approved by the Unicode Consortium through a voting process every year. Once the emojis are approved, Android and iOs systems publish them.
In 2020, over 110 new emojis were added by the Unicode Consortium in Emoji 13.0, including a smiling face with a tear, a transgender flag, bubble tea, and bottle-feeding parents.
According to the 2021 Global Emoji Trend report released on Thursday, “Though the laughing- with-tears is the most popular emoji, the laugh-out-loud emoji has been the most commonly used emoji this year. The thumbs-up emoji came second, followed by the red heart emoji.”
