Everyone loves emojis. They’re often used to joke, express feelings, and at times give someone a piece of your mind. At Battenhall, we love using them for our daily WhatsApp Broadcast messages – which is what inspired us to look into where the universal language of emoji comes from, who decides what emoji launches next and why so many brands and influencers are quickly jumping on the trend.
The name emoji itself consists of a combination of two Japanese words – ‘e’ representing the “picture” and ‘moji’ meaning the “letter” or “character”. The first ever emoji was created between 1998 and 1999 in Japan by Shigetaka Kurita, an employee of NTT DoCoMo – one of the world’s first mobile internet platforms. Kurita’s dream was to “create a new alphabet“ that was more direct and visual, for example when referring to good weather, he said he’d rather see a picture of the sun, instead of a text saying ‘fine’.” Since then The Unicode Consortium, a non-profit organisation located in Silicon Valley, has become in charge of the emoji, now the UK’s fastest growing language, to the point that even The Oxford Dictionary named <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/72x72/1f602.png" alt="