You probably know them, even if you don’t love them.
They pop up on social media and in text messages — how else would you share your Wordle score without giving away the solution? — and have even infiltrated advertisements and work emails. In 2015, the Oxford Dictionary chose one as its “word” of the year.
We’re talking, of course, about emojis.
The colorful pictographs are superb substitutes for those things that are sometimes lost in text-based communication: emotions, body language, tone of voice. And with more than 3,600 to choose from in the Unicode Standard, emojis have somewhat become a language of their own.
How, then, did we get here? As it turns out, there’s a bit of a debate surrounding the creation of the first emojis.
