10 fascinating facts to celebrate World Emoji Day

Happy World Emoji Day! 

Today is the 11th World Emoji Day. It was created on 17th July 2014 by Jeremy Burge, the founder of Emojipedia.

To mark the occasion we’ve rounded up some fun emoji facts.

1.
The first emoji were created by Shigetaka Kurita in 1999, for cellphones and pagers. They are now housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

2.
In 2013 the word ’emoji’ got its own place in the Oxford Dictionary. The definition is: ‘A small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion.’

3.
Oxford’s 2015 word of the year was not actually a word. It was this emoji-

Via

4.
Unicode Consortium, a non-profit organisation, are in charge of the creation of new emojis. Anyone can submit a proposal, and then Unicode look at them and decide which to make based on how many people across the world will recognise them and use them.

5.
It can take one to two years for an emoji to go from an idea to becoming a reality.  landing on your keyboard. Once an emoji becomes part of the Unicode Standard, it can’t be removed.

6.
World Emoji Day is celebrated on July 17th because the calendar emoji on Apple devices shows this date.

7.
An Emojipedia analysis in 2016 showed that only 7% of English language tweets with the peach emoji refer to the actual fruit.

8.
Over 10 billion emojis are sent globally every day …

9.
The word emoji is Japanese, combining the kanji for picture and character. The first work is picture, which is 絵, and is pronounced eh. Letter, or character in Japanese is 文字, and is pronounced mōji.

10.
The most common food emojis are the birthday cake and pizza slice.

Image Vox