World Emoji Day 2022: A look at history, most commonly misinterpreted & upcoming emojis

In the digital age that we live in today, emojis have arguably established a completely new language; apart from adding context to text messages, or highlighting an emotion, on their own, emojis have the ability to express thoughts like any other sentence would.      

On "World Emoji Day" let's take a moment to get together and appreciate how emojis are helping us express or communicate our feelings in this fast-growing digital language and a trend of social distancing. 

These small colourful graphic representations of human moods really deserve a huge shout-out for making our point clear to the person we cannot see while communicating. In today's chatting world, emojis are almost treated as an essential to express our feelings on social media or via messages. Secretly, they are also used by users to sometimes sound less rude in conversations and therefore, in order to encourage the emoji culture, World Emoji Day is celebrated every year on July 17. 

History of emojis

The emoji culture that exploded globally over the last half a decade or so, can be traced back to the 1990s when Japanese programmer Shigetaka Kurita, who was working for a Japanese telecom company called NTT Docomo, created about 176 emojis for the release of a mobile integrated service i-mode. Little did he know the impact that his invention would have on the world. 

Emojis gained popularity after the first model of the Apple iPhone was launched in 2007. Apple, very smartly embedded an emoji keyboard into their device to make it popular among Japanese users. But, soon many non-Japanese users also started using the feature.

On noticing the craze of emojis in the digital world, platforms like Google, Twitter, Microsoft and Facebook began creating their own set of ‘picture words’ in 2010 after Unicode approved the standardised usage of emojis. 

Most commonly misinterpreted emojis

There are many emojis that are often misinterpreted by Indians. Unlike the world, Indians recreate the meaning of emojis according to their interpretation. A survey conducted by Slack in collaboration with Duolingo has revealed that around 58% of global survey respondents say they have been unaware of specific emojis having multiple meanings.

Some of the most commonly misinterpreted emojis are: 

1. The upside-down smiley (🙃): While this emoji indicates silliness, sarcasm, irony, passive aggression, or frustrated resignation, it is often misinterpreted as expressing happiness. 

2. The folded hands emoji (🙏🏻): This is one of the most debated emojis in the chatting world. While some believe it symbolises a person praying or saying Thank You, this actually represents a "high five".  

3. The sassy woman emoji (💁‍♀️): If you have also acted cool by sending this emoji while chatting, this wasn't actually meant for that. It is actually the information desk emoji and not the nuance of sassiness on her face. 

4. Raising hands emoji (🙌): If you’ve been using this emoji to show praise, that's not what this emoji represents. The original meaning of this emoji is high-five used to express joy or celebration. 

5. Grinning face with smiling eyes (😬): If you believe that this grinning face emoji represents your disgust, well guess what, it does not. It’s an extremely smiley, incredibly happy emoji, which we misunderstood for so long.

New emojis up for approval

From thumbs up for a job well done to a heart to send someone your love, emojis have now become a crucial part of our conversations and we can not imagine ourselves holding a chat with another person without the usage of emojis.

Noting the popularity of emojis in today's digital conversations, new emojis are added every year, giving people a chance to express themselves more conveniently.

Ahead of World Emoji Day, Emojipedia mentioned that a shaking face, two pushing hands, a plain pink and a grey heart are some of the emojis that are up for approval this September. Read more about the same here.