“Emoji didn’t become so essential because they stand in for words – but because they finally made writing a lot more like talking.”
Gretchen McCulloch (see Further reading below)
The emoji for ‘calendar‘ shows the 17th July 📅 (click the ‘calendar’ link to find out why) and, since 2014, Emojipedia (an excellent resource for all things emoji, including their history) has celebrated World Emoji Day on that date.
Before we had emoji (the word emoji can be both singular as well as plural, but 'emojis' is fine too) people added text-based 'pictures' to their texts and emails to add flavour to their online conversations, such as
:-) or :) - for a smiling face
:-( or :( - for a sad one.These text-based pictures are known as ’emoticons’ (icons that add emotion) because it isn’t always possible to know just from the words alone what the writer means. They weren’t just used to clarify meaning though, people started to pepper their prose with other playful pictures, such as :p where the ‘p’ is someone blowing a raspberry / sticking their tongue out* and created other icons such as this rose to send to someone on Valentine’s Day @-‘-,->—-, or this polevaulting amoeba ./
Here are the newly released emoji for 2023.
People use emoji in very different ways depending on their age, gender, ethnicity, personal writing style. In our “The Emoji Crystal Ball” article we look at how people can tell a lot about us from the types of emoji we use and the way we use them.
The Emoji Crystal Ball
Fairground fortune tellers claim to be able to tell a lot about you by staring into a crystal ball. They could tell far more about you (that wasn’t made up) by staring at your public social media profile. Even your use of emojis alone gives away something of who you are. Walid Magdy’s research team … Continue reading
Unicode Poo
The Egyptians had a hieroglyph for it, so unicode has a number for it. There’s even more unicode poo in the emoji character set but the Egyptians got there 1000s of years earlier. Here is how the Ancient Egyptians wrote or carved poo … Continue reading
Further reading
- Writing IRL (July 2019) Gretchen McCullock writing in Slate (IRL = In Real Life)
- this is an excerpt about emoji from Gretchen’s fascinating book “Because internet” about internet culture, communication and linguistics (the study of language).
- Penguins and pizza – cracking the secret Valentine’s Day code (February 2018) The Scotsman – on how people are using emoji as a secret language, from research done by Sarah Wiseman and Sandy Gould.
*For an even better raspberry-blowing emoticon try one of the letters (called ‘thorn’) from the Runic alphabet. If you have a Windows computer with a numeric keypad on the right hand side press the Num Lock key at the top to lock the number keypad (so that the keys are now numbers and not up and down arrows etc). Hold down the Alt key (there’s usually one on either side of the spacebar) and while holding it down type 0254 on the numeric keypad and let go. This should now appear wherever your cursor is: þ. Or for the lower case letter it’s Alt+0222 = Þ – for when you just want to blow a small raspberry :Þ
For Mac users press control+command+spacebar to bring up the Character Viewer and just type thorn in the search bar and lots will appear. Double-click to select the one you want, it will automatically paste into wherever your cursor is.
EPSRC supports this blog through research grant EP/W033615/1.
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