World Emoji Day

[Paul Zimmerman]

Well, what a perfect Meme Monday topic, it's World Emoji Day!

The precursor to emojis, emoticons, were simple typographical uses of characters to make a face. Emoticons got their start on September 19, 1982, when Professor Scott Fahlman use the colon, dash, and closed parenthesis to make a sideway smiley face on an electronic bulletin board. Emojis took this graphic implementation a bit further with real graphics and were first used on the J-Phone DP-211SW back in 1997. The original emoji set is shown below.  In 1999, Shigetaka Kurita created 176 emojis for NTT DoCoMo's mobile internet service.

I always thought that emojis were a play on the word emotion, but apparently, the word emoji comes from the Japanese for picture (絵, pronounced eh), and letter or character (文字, mōji), so it actually means something like pictograph in Japanese.

A cool thing about emojis is that they continue to evolve. Each year, new emojis are added, and 2023 is no exception!

Cisco Webex just recently started supporting all emojis for reactions to posts, what great timing!

What's your favorite emoji? Please reply with it!

[yawming]

Ctrl+CMD+Space - the default short cut on Mac

[Alex Stevenson]

🤯

[davidn#]