Who invented emoji?

Summary

But Why: A Podcast for Curious Kids Episode: Who Invented Emoji? Release Date: May 16, 2025

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Introduction

In this captivating episode of But Why: A Podcast for Curious Kids, hosted by Jane Lindholm from Vermont Public, young listener Layla from Melbourne, New Jersey, poses an intriguing question: "How are emojis invented?" This episode delves deep into the origins, evolution, and cultural significance of emojis, unraveling their journey from simple symbols to a global language of digital communication.

Understanding Emoji

Jane Lindholm begins by ensuring all listeners are on the same page about what emojis are. "Emoji are small images, symbols, or icons used in electronic communication," she explains early in the episode. She illustrates this by describing common uses, such as sending a heart to express affection or a smiley face to convey happiness, highlighting how these symbols enhance digital conversations by adding emotional context.

The Birth of Emoji in Japan

Paul Galloway, a collection specialist at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, provides a historical perspective on emojis. "Emoji developed over a long period, but in particular in Japan in the 1990s," he notes at [02:55]. He explains that the term "emoji" is derived from the Japanese words "e" (picture) and "moji" (character), literally translating to "picture character."

Paul recounts how, during the pre-cell phone era, Japanese youth innovatively used pagers with number codes to communicate messages like "I love you" (01069) or "thank you" (049). Recognizing the limitations of numeric codes, the Japanese company NTT DoCoMo introduced pagers and later cell phones that supported emojis, allowing users to send images instead of just numbers. This innovation significantly enhanced personal communication, making it more expressive and efficient.

Evolution from Emoticons to Emojis

Elizabeth Newcamp clarifies the distinction between emoji and emoticons. "Technically, [the shruggy face] is not an emoji. Emoji are actual pictures, and emoticons are the ones that are made with letters and numbers," she explains at [05:39]. Paul expands on this by differentiating between Western emoticons, which are typically sideways, and Japanese kaomoji, which are more complex and can represent a wider range of expressions using additional keyboard characters.

Technological Advancements and Global Adoption

Paul discusses the technological constraints of the 1990s, which resulted in the first emojis being "very simple and blocky" ([07:15]). These early emojis were limited by the primitive computer and cell phone technology of the time, featuring single-color, pixelated designs.

The transformation of emojis from Japan to the global stage began when tech giants like Google and Apple integrated emoji support into their platforms. "In 2006, Google added emoji to Gmail, and in 2010, Apple added emoji to the iPhone," Paul states ([05:35]). This widespread adoption fueled the rapid increase in emoji usage worldwide, with billions being sent daily across various messaging platforms.

Standardization through Unicode

A significant turning point in the evolution of emojis was their standardization by the Unicode Consortium. "Unicode is this organization, and their goal is not related to emoji specifically. It's related to communication and getting all the languages that people use... able to be sent from one device to another across platforms," Jane Solomon, an editor for Emojipedia, explains at [10:50].

Jane details how Unicode began incorporating emojis around 2008-2010 to ensure consistent representation across different devices and platforms. This standardization means that when you send an emoji, it's the underlying code that gets transmitted, allowing the receiver's device to display the appropriate image. She emphasizes the challenges this posed due to varying interpretations and designs of emojis across different platforms before Unicode's intervention.

Emojis in Modern Communication

The podcast explores how emojis have become an integral part of modern communication. Paul reflects on the potential for misinterpretation: "If you send that picture to you and I mean one thing and you think I mean something else, how are we really effectively communicating?" ([15:21]). He argues that just like in spoken language, where tone and facial expressions add nuance, emojis add a layer of emotional context to text-based conversations.

Jane concurs, highlighting the flexibility of emojis: "There's no right or wrong way to use an emoji... They're really just this form of expression that's out there and available to play with," she says at [17:34]. This adaptability allows users to convey complex emotions and intentions, making digital conversations more personal and dynamic.

Emojis as Art

A fascinating segment of the episode features a discussion with Paul about the artistic significance of emojis. "Emoji were a really important moment in communication design and how we could tell the story of where we are right now," he shares ([13:38]). The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) even showcases the original blocky emojis from the 1990s, emphasizing their role in visual culture and communication design.

Paul elaborates on how emojis bridge the gap between art and everyday communication, stating, "Art is a form of communication... And we can communicate ideas visually," ([13:38]). By elevating emojis to the status of art, MoMA highlights their impact on contemporary visual language and digital interaction.

The Future of Emoji: Creation and Expansion

Jane provides insights into how new emojis are created and added to the ever-growing library. "Anyone from the public can submit an emoji proposal... then the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee... reads the proposal and discusses the merits," she explains at [19:15]. With over 3,664 emojis available as of the episode's recording, the selection process has become more rigorous, ensuring that new additions reflect diverse cultures, experiences, and innovations.

Jane also shares her personal favorite emoji, the melting face: "It's a smiley face and the bottom looks as if it's melting. It can express that maybe you're trying to look happy, but things are kind of falling apart," she remarks at [20:19]. This emoji exemplifies the nuanced emotions that modern emojis can convey, resonating with users on multiple levels.

Conclusion

The episode concludes with a call to young listeners to engage creatively with emojis. "What kind of emoji would you propose if you were going to create a new one? Draw a picture of the emoji you think should be there and have your adults send us a photo of it," Jane encourages ([20:57]). This interactive segment not only fosters creativity but also invites the next generation to contribute to the evolving language of digital communication.

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Notable Quotes:

• Paul Galloway ([02:55]): "Emoji developed over a long period, but in particular in Japan in the 1990s."
• Elizabeth Newcamp ([05:39]): "Technically, [the shruggy face] is not an emoji. Emoji are actual pictures, and emoticons are the ones that are made with letters and numbers."
• Paul Galloway ([15:21]): "If you send that picture to you and I mean one thing and you think I mean something else, how are we really effectively communicating?"
• Jane Solomon ([17:34]): "There's no right or wrong way to use an emoji... They're really just this form of expression that's out there and available to play with."
• Paul Galloway ([13:38]): "Emoji were a really important moment in communication design and how we could tell the story of where we are right now."
• Jane Solomon ([20:19]): "It's a smiley face and the bottom looks as if it's melting. It can express that maybe you're trying to look happy, but things are kind of falling apart."

This episode of But Why: A Podcast for Curious Kids masterfully unpacks the multifaceted world of emojis, blending historical context, technological advancements, cultural impact, and artistic significance. Whether you're a parent, educator, or a young listener, this discussion offers valuable insights into how these tiny symbols have profoundly shaped modern communication.

Transcript

[Elizabeth Newcamp]

Hey, it's Elizabeth Newcamp from Care and Feeding, Slate's parenting podcast. Twice a week, my fellow hosts and.

[Paul Galloway]

I offer advice on your pressing questions.

[Elizabeth Newcamp]

About parenting kids of all ages. We take questions on everything from how to handle toddler tantrums to how to help your teen navigate social media. We're here so that you don't feel judged or lonely, and so you have a community to turn to. Join us as we raise the next generation together and follow Care and Feeding right now. See you there. Before we get started, here's a message for the adults who are listening. Support for but why is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. This is but why? A podcast for curious kids from Vermont Public hi, I'm Jane Lindholm. On this show, we take questions from curious kids just like you, and we find answers. We love your questions because often one simple question can inspire us to explore so many different topics. Science, history, art, and culture all wrapped into one question. Today's is kind of like that.

[Paul Galloway]

My name is Layla.

[Jane Solomon]

I'm from Melbourne, New Jersey. I'm nine years old, and my question is how are emojis invented?

[Elizabeth Newcamp]

Before we can answer how emoji were invented, we need to make sure we all know what they are. If you've ever watched a parent or an older sibling or a caregiver sending a message to someone else on their phone, or maybe you've even grabbed their phone yourself, you might have noticed that in addition to typing words, you can type in pictures to get your message across. You might add a heart symbol or a smiley face to end a message with a kind of note of affection, kind of like I love you or I like you. Or you could use the face of someone laughing instead of typing out, that's so funny. When somebody sends you a joke, maybe you want to know what's for dinner. Well, instead of writing what's for dinner tonight? You could punch in a picture of sushi, a chicken drumstick, and a bowl of salad, followed by a question mark. There are lots of pictures to choose from, and all of those symbols are called emoji. Small images, symbols or icons used in electronic communication.

[Paul Galloway]

Emoji developed over a long period, but in particular in Japan in the 1990s. The word is actually a Japanese word. It's a two part word. So e means picture and moji means character. So e, moji means picture, character. My name is Paul Galloway. I'm a collection specialist at the Architecture and Design department in the Museum of Modern Art. And that's a very long way of saying I take care of art and design at the museum.

[Elizabeth Newcamp]

The museum Paul works for is sometimes called moma, because that's what the initials spell. Museum of Modern Art. It's in New York City. As part of his job, Paul is actually working on a book about emoji. And by the way, you say emoji, whether you're talking about a single picture or lots of them, kind of like how one moose is called a moose, and many of those animals altogether are still called moose. Let's get to Layla's question about how emoji were invented. Back in the 1990s, they were developed.

[Paul Galloway]

In people trying to make cell phones and pagers. Before there were cell phones, if you wanted to catch your friend or your parents and they were away from a home phone that had a cord connecting it to the line, you would call a pager and leave a little callback number, and then that person would then go find a public payphone and call back at that number. And the youth in Japan, the young people, didn't like doing it this way. So they immediately started using pagers in a way that nobody anticipated. They would use little number codes to mean things to each other, like 01069 meant I love you, or 049 meant thank you. And they used these kind of codes. And then along came one of the Japanese companies that was selling these pagers and said, you know, what people might really like is a heart. And then they can send a symbol instead of just numbers and letters. So this company was called NTT DoCoMo, which is very much like a big Verizon Wireless or AT&T. It's a huge company. And their pager with a heart on it was extremely popular. And a few years later, they released a cell phone that also had the emoji capability, but this time with 176. So you could say that emoji were made in Japan and made for Japanese pagers and cell phones. But they even go a little further back from that. Some of your listeners might know the kind of emoticons, the smiley faces you can make with a colon and a parenthesis. In Japan, they have more keys and characters on their keyboard. So there's even more complicated faces that they can make, including the shruggy we've all seen the kind of funny shruggy face, right?

[Elizabeth Newcamp]

You make it out of lines and it looks like somebody with their hands raised, like they're going around. I don't know.

[Paul Galloway]

Yeah, it's a wonderful kind of. I use it all the time. People ask me where emoji come from, and I respond with a shrugie, which.

[Elizabeth Newcamp]

Technically is not an emoji. Right. Emoji are actual pictures. And emoticons are the ones that are made with the letters and numbers that are more sort of symbols that represent a picture.

[Paul Galloway]

Right. And they're sideways. That's another key thing. Emoticons. In the west, you have sideways faces, happy faces, angry faces, and kaomoji, which is the Japanese equivalent. They're horizontal, but they're not characters we have on our keyboard. You can't type out the shrugie emoji. We don't have the right characters on your keyboard here in the West, So that's only something that can be done in Japan. So there's emoticons, there's kaomoji, and then emoji become the kind of actual faces that you see on cell phones. And they were used on cell phones in Japan for quite a long time, but they were really stuck in Japan for a while because if you were on a Docomo phone, you couldn't send an emoji to somebody on a different company's phone. So each company had their own kind of locked thing. So it didn't work all that well. And it wasn't until 2006, when Google added emoji to Gmail, and then in 2010 when Apple added emoji to the iPhone, that suddenly the world took notice and started using them. And now emoji are used in crazy numbers. I think on Facebook messenger apps alone, there's 5 billion emojis sent every day. Every single day.

[Elizabeth Newcamp]

The emoji that you are talking about that were built in the 90s, they looked pretty different than what we see on cell phones today. What did they look like?

[Paul Galloway]

Well, they look for kids today, they might be like something they would see in Minecraft. Everything's very blocky and pixelated. And that's because computers back then were very, very weak. They were not very good computers. And in particular, cell phones were very, very primitive. They did not have very strong computers. Their screens were tiny and only had one color. And it was very, very simple graphics. So the emoji from the 90s in Japan are extremely simple and blocky.

[Elizabeth Newcamp]

Emoji today are much more detailed. They look like full little pictures. But how do they get on people's phones? Who chooses which pictures get included and how?

[Jane Solomon]

My name is Jane Solomon. I am a emoji expert, and I'm also a dictionary editor.

[Elizabeth Newcamp]

Jane is an editor for Emojipedia, an online encyclopedia for all things emoji.

[Jane Solomon]

If you go to Emojipedia and you want to look up, okay, what are different meanings for this kind of hand gesture or this flower or whatever, you might be able to find some information there. You might be able to find what flower specifically it is, and you'd also be able to find how it looks across different platforms.

[Elizabeth Newcamp]

By different platforms, she means things like different phones made by different companies. So a picture of a cactus might look different on a phone made by Apple than on an Android phone. Here's something that might be tough to wrap your head. When you send an emoji, what is actually being sent from one phone to another isn't the picture itself. It's a code. The code gets sent from your phone to your friend's phone. So, okay, I'm going to send Melody a picture of a cactus. First I find the picture I want, and then I hit send. And now Melody's phone is going to read or interpret the code from my phone, and what she'll see on her screen is a picture of a cactus. She sent me back a bison and a sloth, so I'm going to send her a heart. Now, something simple like a heart is pretty easy to make from one phone to the next. But as the emoji pictures got more complicated as more and more of them have been created and they looked different, like, I mean, you can get a bowl of spaghetti with sauce, or you could send a picture of a person getting a haircut. Well, not all the phones and devices were making the pictures from those codes in exactly the same way on every kind of phone.

[Jane Solomon]

Well, for example, there were emoji that were of different facial expressions, and they could have completely different meanings or based on who was sending it and what device they had and who was receiving it and what device they had. For example, one of them is the grimacing face, which is basically a yellow face emoji with two eyes and then a mouth that's kind of in an oval shape with teeth showing. And in the past, it appeared differently on different phones. It was a completely different expression.

[Elizabeth Newcamp]

If you think you're sending your friend one kind of face, but your friend is actually seeing something totally different, that doesn't make communication go very smoothly. So a group that deals with computer language got involved to create some emoji rules.

[Jane Solomon]

Unicode is this organization, and their goal is not related to emoji specifically. It's related to communication and getting all the languages that people use, all the written languages able to be sent from one device to another across platforms, any language you want to do. And these big tech companies don't necessarily prioritize making communication accessible in those languages. So Unicode makes these code points for these different characters that might not have existed if there weren't an organization looking out for that. Now, Emoji got added on to this mission around 2008, 2009, 2010. They started working on making emoji accessible in this way, because before, you could only really use them if you had specific phones and were in Japan, basically. So emoji got pulled into that because they were viewed as this important mode of communication.

[Elizabeth Newcamp]

And so now when you send an emoji to a friend, you can be pretty sure your friend is going to see the same picture on their phone that you have on yours. But Unicode, the organization in charge of this, also has a lot of control over which new emoji get added, and Jane is part of the group that makes those decisions. Coming up are emoji art, and how can you get a new emoji added? This is but why a podcast for curious kids. I'm Jane Lindholm. Today we're learning about emoji, those little pictures you can send in text messages and emails. At MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, you can see the original emoji, created in Japan in the 1990s. They're projected up on a huge white wall, so they're bigger than your head. There's like a weird little umbrella, a boxy little car. There's a sun, which looks like a circle with little lines around it. I mean, remember, these were the olden days of emojis. So they look blocky and pixelated, not like the pictures of today, but still, you can tell what they are. They're definitely real pictures of things. So if you send that boxy umbrella, the other person is probably going to know it's an umbrella. But what are these boxy images doing in one of the most impressive art museums in the whole world? Are emoji art? We asked Paul Galloway. He's the guy who says he takes care of art and design at moma.

[Paul Galloway]

Emoji, we felt, were a really important moment in communication design and how we could tell the story of where we are right now. We love taking design objects that everybody uses Every day, chairs, cars, trains that you're on and environments that you're in and helping people see them in a new way. And most people are completely unfamiliar with where emoji come from, how they started. The fact that emoji is a Japanese word, I can't tell you how many people think it has emotion as part of the word. And it's like, no, no, no. It's completely nothing about emotion in the word. It's a Japanese word. So we love that idea of sharing with people the genesis of this story and then helping them to kind of think about why we use emoji and why they've become so important to us. An important thing to remember is that art is a form of communication. It's a way of taking an idea from me, the artist, and giving it to you, the viewer. And that's done visually. And we can communicate ideas visually. We can communicate ideas verbally by speaking them out loud. We can communicate ideas by sending messages to each other. And so art and language have been linked forever. In fact, art is much older than the written word. And an art museum, our job is to tell the world about visual culture. So we feel it very important to help educate our public of the importance of the art that is in their lives every day. We like to think of architecture and design as the art that goes home with you, right? You go to moma and you see Van Gogh and you see Picasso, and you go home and you live with the art that's on your iPhone or on the video game that you're playing, and you are part of that artistic story.

[Elizabeth Newcamp]

One of the things I've been thinking about is how people use emoji today, often instead of using words. But what if your idea of what a face with star eyes means is different from what I think it means? If I send that picture to you and I mean one thing and you think I mean something else, how are we really effectively communicating? Are pictures going to give enough information for someone to know what you're trying to tell them? Paul says there are lots of ways we get our meaning across that don't just involve words. And there's lots of ways to be confused by things. Even when we use the same words.

[Paul Galloway]

We talk about tone and intention and written speech, but it's very much a part of spoken speech as well. If I'm talking to you and I am your boss and I say, good job, there's a million ways that can be heard. I can say, good job or good job or good job, right? All of Them are the exact same words, but they're delivered with completely different meanings. And we can call that gesture, we can call that intonation, but there's also my face. What kind of expression was on my face when I was saying good job? All of those are the kind of important context and further clarification of the word good job. And emoji can do that as well. You can say good job and a thumbs up emoji, that can be read as actually affirming you did a good job, or it can be read as sarcastic. But that same danger can be had in person. Right. We are always at risk of miscommunicating. And in a way, I think emoji, by allowing more interpretation in the message, actually makes the speech much more human. Because if we're just typing good job like a robot, there's. We're just left wondering, like, what could they mean? I have no idea. Am I actually talking to a person, or is this an artificial intelligence chatbot on the other end? Whereas when you start using emoji, you're bringing the human into the conversation, you're bringing the chance of misinterpretation or a richer understanding of what somebody is intending. It allows for a little bit more chaos, which conversation is chaotic.

[Elizabeth Newcamp]

Jane Solomon agrees.

[Jane Solomon]

There's no right or wrong way to use an emoji. You want to make sure that the person that you're sending emoji to understands what you're saying. And it's very hard to express that sometimes with just emoji. But if we use words alongside emoji, our points can get across. Or if we have an established connection with someone and they have the same understanding of an emoji as we do, we can send them back and forth and it can be very meaningful. But, you know, use them however you want. They're really just this form of expression that's out there and available to play with.

[Elizabeth Newcamp]

While emoji have come a long way from those pixelated images of 30 years ago, Jane says she actually kind of.

[Jane Solomon]

Liked those better at this point. Like in modern times, emoji have a lot more detail. They have shadows, they have really subtle expressions and differences in the line quality. So, yeah, they look a lot different now. I actually prefer the less detailed emoji designs because when something is less detailed, it could represent more things. When something is more detailed, it shuts off some of these interpretations or it makes it a little bit more of a stretch to think about it in a different way.

[Elizabeth Newcamp]

Okay, so what if you want to create a new emoji and get it in everybody's phone or at least want to suggest one that you think should be there.

[Jane Solomon]

Anyone from the public can submit an emoji proposal at this point, and then a group of people called the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, and I'm actually part of that group, reads the proposal and discusses the merits of the proposal and then recommends or doesn't recommend it to become encoded into the emoji set so it can be used by people all over the world across devices.

[Elizabeth Newcamp]

As we're making this episode, there are 3,664 emoji. That sounds like a lot to choose from, but Jane says the committee has approved a lot fewer emoji in recent years than they did in the past. Either way, it's definitely grown beyond the handful of original emoji created for pagers in Japan back in the 1990s. Now, in terms of favorite emojis, what's your favorite? Jane says one of hers is actually a relatively new one, the melting face emoji.

[Jane Solomon]

So it's a smiley face and it's. And the bottom of the smiley face looks as if it's melting. And I think that's a really good and fun emoji because can express a lot of feelings at once. It can express that maybe you're trying to look happy, but things are kind of falling apart, which I'm sure everyone can relate to. And it can also express sarcasm. So it's just a really funny emoji to send to people. I like that one.

[Elizabeth Newcamp]

Thanks so much to Jane Solomon with emojipedia and to Paul Galloway at the Museum of Modern Art for teaching us all about emoji. What kind of emoji would you propose if you were going to create a new one? Draw a picture of the emoji you think should be there and have your adults send us a photo of it. We want to see what you would create. That's it for this episode. If you have a question about anything, have an adult record you asking it. It's easy to do on a smartphone using a voice recording app. Don't forget to include your first name, where you live and how old you are. Then your adult can email the file to questions.org we can't answer every question, but we listen to them all and we love hearing what's on your mind. But why is produced by Melody Beaudet and me, Jane Lindholm, at Vermont Public, and we're distributed by prx. Our theme music is by Luke Reynolds. We'll be back in two weeks with an all new episode. Until then, stay curious.

[Paul Galloway]

From PRX.