I just discovered some less known facts about the one true international language: emoji.
- The term emoji has nothing to do with emoticon. It actually comes from the Japanese e (絵, “picture”) + moji (文字, “character”). 😎
- Standardized emoji have been around all the way since Unicode 1.0. However, it was not until Unicode 6.0 that they were officially recognized as emoji. 😮
- The said Unicode 6.0 added a whopping 716 emoji to the existing 142 — the largest addition till date. 😱
- As of the current standard, Unicode 9.0, there are 1088 emoji as single code points. This does not even include stuff like 💑, which are composed of multiple code points. (In programming terms,
"💑".length === 2
.) 🤓
If you want more interesting stuff about emoji, follow @notwaldorf and @kosamari on Twitter.
😃👋,
Darshak