We all use emojis every day, so why not celebrate them?
Welcome to World Emoji Day — celebrated annually on July 17. The 2024 event was the eleventh annual global emoji celebration! World Emoji Day will return for 2025!
World Emoji Day is celebrated every year on July 17. This fun holiday was proposed by Jeremy Burge, the founder of the emoji reference site Emojipedia, and first observed in 2014. The date was chosen because Apple’s calendar emoji displays “17” (📅), marking the day Apple originally launched its iCal app. Each year, the official site (https://worldemojiday.com/ ) even holds its own “Emoji Awards.”
Text alone often fails to convey tone, attitude, or emotion, leading to misunderstandings. The first “smiley”
emoticon :-) — formed from a colon, hyphen, and parenthesis — was posted in 1982 on Carnegie Mellon
University’s BBS by Professor Scott Fahlman to represent a smile. It caught on quickly, and its opposite,
:-(, soon followed.
Building on ASCII emoticons, Japanese users created kaomoji using kanji, kana, and punctuation to express richer emotions — especially in the eyes — and designed to be read horizontally. For example:
In 1995, Japan’s NTT DoCoMo released a new pager that featured a heart symbol. Seeking to appeal to younger users, interface designer Shigetaka Kurita drew on manga, Chinese characters, street signs, and everyday imagery to create 176 standardized 12×12-pixel pictograms — today’s first true emoji set. Some accounts also credit SoftBank in 1997 with an early emoji set of its own.
The term emoji comes from the Japanese 絵文字 (えもじ), literally “picture character.” In 2014, “emoji” was officially added to the online Oxford English Dictionary.
Unicode is an international standard for encoding the world’s characters and symbols. In 2010, the nonprofit Unicode Consortium officially incorporated emoji into the Unicode Standard, assigning each a unique code point. This ensured that emojis sent between different platforms wouldn’t turn into garbled text.
Beyond encoding, the Consortium reviews proposals for new emoji and decides which should be added. As society evolves, emoji palettes have grown more inclusive — introducing diverse skin tones, genders, cultural symbols, and more. The rise of smartphones and popular social apps has cemented the yellow-face emoji as an indispensable part of modern digital communication.