Emojis are not just funny pictures on your smartphone, but a full-fledged modern language. Small colored icons can convey tone, mood, or hidden meaning faster than words, and sometimes even more accurately than lengthy explanations. We use them every day without even thinking about how much they change the way we communicate.
Despite their small size, emojis influence how we perceive messages, build emotional connections, and shape online culture. They have become part of a dynamic, flexible, and constantly changing language. In this article, we will explore how the world of emojis was formed, why they have become so popular, and what lies behind their boundless diversity.
What was there before emojis?
Before emojis appeared in their familiar form, people already tried to convey emotions using text symbols. This is how emoticons, known to many as “smileys,” came about — a combination of punctuation marks that form a “face.” The first documented smiley :-) was proposed by Professor Scott Fahlman in 1982 on a university forum to indicate jokes and avoid misunderstandings in correspondence. The smiling face was immediately “approved,” followed by the sad face :-(. Emoticons quickly spread and became a universal way of conveying emotions in text.
At the same time, Japan had its own culture of text-based “emoticons” – kaomoji (literally “face characters”). Unlike Western “horizontal” emoticons, which require you to tilt your head to read, kaomoji were read vertically and were more complex:
(^_^) (T_T) (^ω^)
(¬ ‿ ¬) (x_x) e_e
(-_-;) ( ͡o ╭╮ ͡o) ( ≧▽≦ )
(*_*) (^.^) o_O
It was the combination of these two worlds, Western emoticons and Japanese kaomoji, that laid the foundation for the emergence of emojis: the transition from text symbols to small ideograms and smileys.
Birth
The history of emojis began in 1999 in Japan, when designer Shigetaka Kurita created the first set of 176 pictograms for mobile operator NTT DoCoMo. At a time when SMS messages were strictly limited in terms of the number of characters, these 12×12 pixel icons became a way to convey emotions and meanings with a single gesture—where words could not fit.
Inspired by manga, weather, road signs, and Japanese culture, the first emojis instantly became popular. First among Japanese youth, then throughout the country. The global emoji boom came a little later: after the iPhone appeared in Japan and they were officially added to the Unicode standard in 2010. From that moment on, emojis became universal — the same on different platforms and accessible to people all over the world.
Social role
Emojis have become an important tool in branding because they allow companies to communicate in a more friendly, relaxed, and emotional way. Using emojis in emails, advertising messages, or social media helps brands appear more “human” and “approachable,” reducing the distance between the company and its audience and making communication easier.
People actively add emojis to their messages because plain text often causes concern, and a period at the end of a sentence can be perceived as too abrupt or formal. According to Adobe's Future of Creativity: 2022 U.S. Emoji Trend Report, 91% of respondents use emojis to make their messages more lighthearted, and 73% believe that it makes their messages “cooler,” friendlier, and funnier.
The popularity of these small graphic symbols has grown so much that they have begun to influence not only the way we communicate, but also cultural trends. What's more, in 2015, the Oxford English Dictionary named the emoji “face with tears of joy” 😂 as its word of the year for the first time. And in 2017, riding the wave of emoji popularity, a full-length animated film called The Emoji Movie was released. Although it received mostly negative reviews, it still demonstrated the scale of emoji's influence on popular culture.
The same cultural impact was added by World Emoji Day, founded in 2014 by Jeremy Burge, the creator of Emojipedia, on July 17 – this is the day depicted on the calendar emoji 📅. Today, emoji usage is even tracked in real time: the EmojiTracker website records user activity, and according to data for 2025, the most popular graphic symbols remain ❤️ , 😭 , ✅ , 🔥 and 🥹 .
Pitfalls and unspoken etiquette
It's easy to get lost in the variety of modern emojis. According to the same study by Adobe Future of Creativity, the most incomprehensible to users are 🤠, 🍒 and 🙃. But it is precisely in this ambiguity that their charm lies: each community, generation or even a narrow circle of friends can endow emojis with their own meanings and interpret them in their own context.
And while most emojis have an intuitive meaning, some of them have received additional, sometimes completely non-obvious interpretations. For example:
💅 – visual form of the word slay, denotes delight or approval;
🤡 – a hint to the interlocutor that his thesis sounds bad;
👉👈 – shyness or indecision;
🙃 – irony, sarcasm or absurdity of the situation;
🫴👑 – "here is your crown, you dropped it";
🥲 – smile through pain;
👁️👄👁️ – state of shock or lack of words;
🫠 – "melted" from emotions or situation;
🤌 – feeling something to the fullest;
👀 – interest or expectation of continuation;
🙂 – not just a smile, but often a passive-aggressive subtext;
🫂 – support without the need to add anything in words;
🫣 – a feeling of anxiety when it is scary to even look;
🤔 – indicates reflection;
🫡 – confirmation gesture: "accepted, I'll do it";
😑 – expression of distrust or suspicion;
😮💨 – exhale of relief;
🙏 – request or thanks;
☝️ – emphasis on an important point;
🗿 – poker face / brick face;
✍️ – a signal that the thought has been recorded or noted;
💯 – full support of what was said;
🚩 – red flag, a marker of something toxic, dangerous, or questionable.
Despite the freedom of interpretation, the community has developed certain unspoken rules for using emojis. For example, the familiar, at first glance, gesture 👍 can be perceived much more sharply than it seems. In real life, it is often used to denote passive aggression, so as a reaction to a message it is quite appropriate, but sending it in a separate message is not always worth it - the interlocutor may read it as coldness or irritation.
It is also undesirable to abuse the quantity: more than one or two emojis in a row create the impression of infantility, and decorating each sentence turns the text into a colorful children's hodgepodge. Emojis should enhance the meaning, not replace it, so you should not replace words and make the message a rebus (like: "I ate 🍕 today at 🍽️, and then watched 📺").
A separate category is emojis with hints. Eggplant, banana, peach and other emojis that have obvious phallic or erotic associations should not be sent to unfamiliar people in separate messages. Peach, for example, may be associated not with the fruit, but with the gluteal muscles. Such symbols can easily be read as inappropriate flirting or even harassment.
Instead of conclusions ✨
Emojis have long ceased to be just decorative additions to messages; they have become part of digital culture, a way to convey emotions, and even a marker of differences between generations. But despite their versatility, emojis still need to be used wisely. Context, quantity, relevance, and cultural associations all shape how your message will be read. One emoji can support, cheer, or bring people closer together, while another can unintentionally offend or create tension.