Have you ever used the calendar emoji while texting? The calendar emoji, finalised by Unicode in 2010, shows the date as July 17 and just by this virtue, the 17th of every July is celebrated as World Emoji Day. In 2014, Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge started World Emoji Day.

Emojis have become an important part of our day-to-day conversations as people can express a wide range of emotions through them. The Oxford Dictionary added the word emoji in 2013. Later, in 2015, the Oxford Dictionary chose an emoji -- a face with tears of joy -- as its word of the year pick.

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Emoji is a Japanese expression that roughly translates to ‘picture word’. It was created by Shigetaka Kurita in 1999. Kurita worked for the Japanese telecom company NTT Docomo. He designed emojis as a feature on Docomo pagers to make them more appealing to teens. He created a set of over 175 12-pixel by 12-pixel emoji as a messaging feature. However, the emojis actually took off after Apple introduced an emoji-embedded keyboard into its first iPhone in 2007.

More than 10 billion emojis and 700 million stickers and GIFs are sent to people by smartphone users on an everyday basis, according to Bobble AI’s data intelligence. Today, users have the choice to choose from over 1,800 emojis ranging from transportation, food, and an assortment of wild and domesticated animals to social platforms, weather, and bodily functions.

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On World Emoji Day, several tech companies, including Apple, launch a new set of emojis. Even during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Apple rolled out 117 new emojis for iPhone and Mac. During the pandemic, people used emojis of microbes, a face with a medical mask, and folded hands to express their thoughts about the virus.

Meanwhile, social media giants like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp release a list of the most-used emojis on their platforms to mark World Emoji Day.

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(Edited by : Sudarsanan Mani)