We use emoji every day in every text message, so why not celebrate them?

Yes, July 17 of every year is celebrated as the world emoji day. Before going to the celebration let us know the history of emoji. 

Before introducing emojis, there were emoticons, facial expressions made with punctuation marks. The very first emoticons appeared in the year 1881 in an issue of Puck magazine. This magazine published four different faces – joy, melancholy, indifference, and astonishment and called them typographical art.

They were first used in 1982 as a way of communicating emotions online. When it became a difficult task for people to understand the difference between jokes and serious posts on a Carnegie Mellon University digital message board, one of the faculty members Scott Fahlman came up with another solution: The symbol 🙂 to be added to denote humorous posts, and the symbol 🙁 to denote serious ones. In this announcement, he even specified the readers to read it in sideways.

So, now comes the emojis. These little pictures make texting so fun. These were created in the year 1998 by Shigetaka Kurita, an engineer at the Japanese phone company, NTT Docomo. He was working on a process for customers to communicate with the help of icons. The result was a set of 176 icons which he names as emoji. This name was the combination of two Japanese words: e for picture and moji for a character. Kurita said that he draws his emojis with the inspiration from “manga”, a Chinese character, and international signs for bathrooms.

Now there are more than 1,800 emojis exist. The best part is that we don’t need to tilt our heads sideways to understand them.

So why it is July 17?

We all may doubt why it is celebrated on July 17. So here is a very interesting fact about emoji day. The “calendar emoji” we use is displaying July 17 on it, which is the reason for us to choose it as the date for World Emoji Day.

The calendar emoji date is why this July 17 was chosen, but the day is much bigger than just one emoji because World Emoji Day is a celebration of all the other emojis.