Recognizing the arrival of a new emoji, potentially on all smartphones, tablets and computers on the planet, is anything but the decision of a single person or a single brand. But let’s start at the beginning: anyone can propose the creation of a new emoji. You, me, anyone. Just find the idea of a missing emoji that would meet a need, and submit a file.
This is what an American journalist from the site did The Verge, in 2017. Seeing his cat yawn, Jay Peters says to himself: well, and why not a yawning emoji, since this one does not exist? Our colleague, motivated solely by the beauty of the gesture, since there is nothing but pride to be gained, builds his file and two years later, the yawning emoji arrives, after having been validated by the Emojis Subcommittee at the Unicode Consortium.
Unicode is the organization created by 12 tech giants in 1991 – Apple is still part of it alongside Adobe, Google, Microsoft, SAP and Salesforce in particular – to standardize the way of representing the different languages on a screen : Chinese, French, Russian, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, etc… 150,000 characters in all, each being identified by a unique code.
Within Unicode, there is therefore this sub-committee which meets, in plenary session, four times a year to decide very officially on these rather special characters that are emojis, version 14 of which becomes a reality with these 37 new pictographs about to arrive on iPhone, including the pregnant man, disco ball and melting face.
In reality, the emoji is the descendant of the smiley: remember this face in a circle on a bright yellow background, with two eyes and a smile. The smiley was invented in 1963 by Harvey Ball, an American graphic designer, at the request of a customer, an insurer, who wanted to give his employees a boost.
In 1982, computing developed and to indicate emotions in text messages, we began to juxtapose typographic characters: a colon, a dash and a closing parenthesis. Yes, it’s the famous horizontal smiley. Now, if you replace the colon with a semicolon, you get a wink! This is the principle of the emoticon. The term appeared in 1990.
And then, just before the year 2000, the first emojis – “e” for “image” and “moji” for “letter” in Japanese – appeared in Japan, at Softbank and NTT DoCoMo with i-Mode technology (the former Bouygues Telecom subscribers in France may still remember it).
Emojis landed on Gmail in 2009, on Outlook in 2017, and then on Facebook, Twitter and on our smartphones. With each update, it’s always the same chronology: the consortium validates then everyone integrates – at their own pace – the new emojis. There are nearly 4,000 today.
As Apple prepares to integrate 37 new emojis from Unicode version 14, the next salvo – version 15 – is already in the works with 21 more emojis, including a shaking face, snow goose, jellyfish, maracas, flute and ginger! They will not arrive within reach of keyboards before next September.