A Short History of Emoji

From 176 pixel pictures on Japanese phones in 1999 to more than 3,700 Unicode emojis today.

1999: the first emoji

The first widely used emoji set was designed by Shigetaka Kurita for NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode mobile internet service in 1999 — 176 pictures at 12×12 pixels, covering weather, traffic, technology and a handful of faces. (Earlier, in 1997, SoftBank’s J-Phone had shipped a smaller set.) Rival Japanese carriers made incompatible sets, so an emoji sent between networks often arrived as the wrong picture.

2010: Unicode

Google and Apple engineers proposed encoding emoji in the Unicode Standard so they would work across systems. Unicode 6.0 (October 2010) added 722 emoji characters. Apple put an emoji keyboard on the iPhone in 2011 and worldwide use exploded.

2015 onward: diversity and growth

Emoji 1.0 (2015) introduced skin-tone modifiers; later releases added gender-neutral people, same-sex couples, accessibility emojis (2019) and hundreds of new objects, animals and foods. Unicode now adds a release roughly once a year; Emoji 16.0 (2024) brought 🫩 face with bags under eyes and 🫜 root vegetable, among others. Including variants there are over 3,700 emojis.

How new emojis are chosen

Anyone can submit a proposal to the Unicode Consortium. Proposals must show expected usage, distinctiveness and completeness of a set; brands, logos and specific people are rejected. Approved emojis take about a year to reach phones because each vendor must draw its own artwork.