All About Emoji: Emoji Meanings, Invention, Unicode, Language

In this article, we have mentioned all about emojis. It’s invention, the world emoji day, emojicode programming language and much more.

Emoji Meaning

The word emoji comes from Japanese e (picture) plus moji (character). It means “Image Character”. It is used to express your feeling, emotion, work, thing in just a single icon.

 

Emoji Invention

In 1999, Shigetaka Kurita, a Japanese man invented Emoji. He was working at DoCoMo, a mobile communication company, and at that time, he was a part of the team working on NTT, mobile first Internet platform. Their framework constrained clients to 250 characters in messages, so Kurita figured emoji would enable clients to convey more effectively while utilizing less information.

First, he discovered 176 sets of very simple emojis that tell a variety of emotions and ideas like happy, sad, moods, feelings, weather, foods. Everyone loved using this. As it is very user-friendly and saves lots of typing.
 




 

Emoji Unicode

It was a great achievement of Emoji when it was standardized in Unicode. The Unicode is the Universal Standard which describes all possible characters of all languages and a lot of symbols with one unique number for each character or symbol. Hundreds of emoji characters were encoded in the Unicode Standard in version 6.0 released in October 2010. Unicode 12.0 contains emoji using 1,311 characters.

 

World Emoji Day

These emojis are so popular that it is really a language of its own, as it is widely used in social media, comment boxes, on websites, social networking, text messages, apps and even used in books also. The World Emoji Day is celebrated on 17 July, since 2014 and deemed as a “global celebration of emoji”. The brain behind this was Jeremy Burge. According to the New York Times, Burge chose 17 July “as the calendar emoji is shown on iPhones on this date”, after that every year this is celebrated on 17 July.

In 2016, Google uses the calendar emoji to show 17 July on its products. In 2015, Pepsi launched PepsiMoji, which included emoji of pepsi cans and bottles. Since 2017, Apple has announced an upcoming range of emojis for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch. In 2019, Apple and Google have revealed their plan for upcoming new brand emojis.

There is an official website (https://emojipedia.org/) that contains all the emoji meaning and usages with unicode characters. It documents about all emoji’s versions, Unicode versions, platforms, latest emoji news and much more. 




 

Emojicode: Emoji Programming Language

At the top of this article, we have mentioned about the general knowledge of Emoji. Now let’s come to the developer’s perspective. If you are in a software industry, definitely you should learn the Emojicode programming language.

Emojicode is an open source, static, strongly typed, full-blown programming language consisting of emojis. If you really want to grasp this language, please go to its official website.

https://www.emojicode.org/

Emoji In Web Applications

With the emoji popularity, most programming language introduce syntax to construct full unicode for emoji and international characters. Emojis are UTF-8 encoded symbols. To add emoji in the HTML web page, we add the utf-8 charset.

<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

If you are using the PHP programming language, you can set this in the header, like –

<?php
 header('Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
?>

Example

<p>I am 1F600 Today.</p><br/>
<p>I want to eat 1F349.</p><br/>
<p>Everybody loves a 1F308.</p>

Output

I am 😀 Today.

 

I want to eat 🍉.

 

Everybody loves a 🌈.