World Emoji 2025: How Emojis evolve from Japanese hieroglyphs to global languages
In today’s digital world, language is not always enough, and emojis have become a common way of expressing emotions. As people around the world celebrate World Emoji Day on July 17, attention has turned to how these tiny symbols have changed the way we communicate on phone and social media.
The World Emoji Festival was first celebrated in 2014. It started with Jeremy Burge, the founder of Emoticons, an explanation of emoticons. The reason I chose July 17 is because it is the date displayed on the calendar emoji, making it the perfect day to celebrate the emoji.
A global Japanese idea
The emoji was first created in Japan in the late 1990s. A man named Shigetaka Kurita works at a mobile company called NTT DOCOMO and designed a set of 176 very simple pictures. These tiny 12 x-12 pixel icons help people express emotions in text messages. This small idea gradually developed into a global trend.
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Cultural influence and modern use
Perhaps the turning point was in 2010, when Unicode consortium standardized emojis, allowing them to run continuously across platforms and devices. It then adopted its iOS platform by Apple in 2011 and was used in Google’s Android system in 2013. Since then, emojis have gone from simple smiley faces to carefully designed symbol sets representing culture, gender, career and more.
Over the past decade, emojis have gained more and more cultural significance. The Unicode version introduces features such as skin tone modifiers, gender-neutral representations, and icons representing disability and different relationships. The subsequent increase was inclusive, suggesting that global identity is now a key player in making digital languages reflect real-world diversity.
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But by 2025, emojis are more than simply decorating text. They have found a wide range of applications in marketing activities, workplace dialogue and political messaging. The emoji currency on social offers them fun, ironic, emotional or trending advantages overseen by sites from X, Instagram and WhatsApp.
As the world emoji of 2025 is celebrated globally, it provides a moment to reflect on the development of digital expressions and the little things like symbols that speak.
