Character arc: How the world of emojis is changing
There are only eight new emojis being released this year. There is only one for the climate crisis. New apps are letting people make their own. Take a look.
It’s only Day 5 of the year, and there are three new ways to say “I’m done with this”: 
The face with bags under the eyes, the leafless tree and the shovel are among eight new emojis due for launch between March and May. (The designs above are the base concepts approved by the Unicode Consortium, and vendors such as Google, Apple and Meta will likely put their own spin on each.)
If eight seems like a low number, it really is. (Click here for more on how this number has been falling, steadily, in recent years.)
This universal bank of icons has, of course, boomed since the first set of 176 was created by the 27-year-old Japanese software developer Shigetaka Kurita, in 1999.
Inspired by manga, street signs and the pager texting culture, he created a set of pixelated icons for use by the Japanese company Docomo. The idea was to offer cellphone users a fun, alternative mode of communication, but the first set included mainly icons for weather, traffic and new devices. Most were stand-ins for nouns, rather than emotions.
More icons were added, as platforms such as BlackBerry and MSN Messenger developed their own emoji dictionaries, but cross-platform compatibility remained limited. Then, in 2009, the Unicode Consortium, a US-based nonprofit, stepped in to build a standardised set across platforms, and began to expand the dictionary too.
Every year since, they have received hundreds of proposals for new icons. These are vetted by a panel, typically made up of representatives from tech giants and experts in linguistics and design; the panel determines which ones to add. (Interestingly, no emoji has ever been deleted from the Unicode set.)
There are now 3,790 in all (including the eight newest).
According to Unicode, 92% of the world’s online population uses them. An analysis of more than 7 billion posts on X, conducted by Emojipedia, an online emoji reference repository, indicated that nearly one in five tweets posted between September 2011 and July 2021 featured an emoji.
How is this universal visual language — the first one used this widely (there have been others, such as typable emoticons and Zapf Dingbats characters, but on a far smaller scale) — shaping how we communicate?
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Between the agility of communication in the digital age, and its counterbalance, the curse of our shrinking attention spans, the tilt in communication today is clearly towards the visual and the multimodal, says Jieun Kiaer, a professor of Korean linguistics at University of Oxford and author of Emoji Speak: Communication and Behaviours on Social Media (2023).
“The visual component is becoming more and more important.”
Paired with the fact that most communication today occurs not face-to-face but long-distance (via text, email, online post), the visuals perform the vital role that body language once did: of conveying mood and tone.
“In this way, emojis help build context and, vitally, prevent misinterpretation,” says Lieke Verheijen, assistant professor of language and communication at Radboud University in the Netherlands.
Anyone who has ever sent out an email saying, “Hey, where’s that spreadsheet,” knows how every bit of punctuation added to or withheld alters the message itself.
It is possible, in fact, that had video and audio technology come first, scripts and writing would have evolved very differently — as a means of recording and tabulating data, keeping records, organising how the world was run and documenting world-altering ideas, says Kiaer. Rather than what it has been for thousands of years: our primary form of communication after the spoken word.
As things stand, we now have the whole gamut of options to choose from.
A text from the boss asking for an update on a project or allocating a new assignment can be met with a single green tick or a shrug (if you’re feeling adventurous). An otherwise awkward end to a thread can be improved with a heart or thumbs-up reaction, turning what would have been an indefinite pause into a dopamine shot of positive reinforcement.
“Never before in human history have we been so hard-pressed to respond,” says Verheijen. We are flooded with communication hourly, and most of it requires acknowledgement in some form. “Speed and brevity are both important, but so is nuance. This is where emojis can be incredibly effective. They convey so much, with so little, in so little time.”
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Our favourite examples:
The joined hands that signal please or thank-you in Japanese culture, where it originated, but is a namaste in India, and a high-five in the West.
The person walking that became code for Russians who wanted to indicate they were headed to a protest.
The red flag that started out as a symbol for golf but has become a byword for a high risk factor in a potential partner.
We also love the purple heart, for reasons that have nothing to do with war; and the watermelon, for reasons that have everything to do with an ongoing war.
Click here for more of our emoji special: lists of favourite emojis, the world’s most popular ones (a very different list), and ways in which AI could already be changing it all (because why should the world of emojis be any exception).
