This Week I Learned #6: Emoji Facts

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