7 ms·

Emoji History: The Missing Years

141 points by simonpure 2y ago

fouc 2y ago
Honestly, I kinda feel like emojis don't technically start until they actually showed up with multiple colors & some sense of depth / 3d-like look.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- msephton 2y ago
  When would that be?
- kergonath 2y ago
  Why, though? I don’t think 2D versus pseudo-3D is a significant difference. They are still used the same way, in the same contexts, and mean the same thing. Also, a lot of the common representations went back to flat, or never made it to 3D in the first place.
- deruta 2y ago
  I concur. Consider TFA. The symbols are not converted to from ASCII smileys and are used like an extension of the charset. Conversely, I remember web chatrooms in the mid-00s, where a colon-paren would always be converted to the service's pallette's rendition of an emoticon, pretty color and 3D to beat. Plus, there's a question of how people use them, but that distinction I think came later
  - msephton 2y ago
    Interesting to note that I can still type colon-paren today and have it converted, but usually to an emoji instead of the forum smiley gif. On Discord, GitHub, etc
gumby 2y ago
This is great work. I remember seeing them on my keitai mid 90s but feeling that they were familiar. So filling in some gaps like this helps me not feel like I was crazy.
- msephton 2y ago
  Happy to have helped put your mind at ease!
tkgally 2y ago
One of the things that has fascinated me about emoji is that they are a type of character that had been largely unfamiliar to most of the world: ideograms. While their emergence in a country with a well-established ideographic writing system—Japan, kanji—may not be surprising, their widespread adoption in places that had basically used only alphabets is, at least to me. I wonder to what extent emoji use might evolve so that people without a common spoken language can use them to communicate with each other, the way classical Chinese has historically been used in East Asia. Judging from some emoji-filled comment sections I’ve seen on streaming platforms, it seems that that evolution may have already begun.
- legostormtroopr 2y ago
  I would be worried about such an environment where emojis were a serious communication mechanism. Both from a risk of misinterpretation and the fact that language could be changed by font designers. At present date there is no way to say "gun" in emoji, and even worse so the phrase "Bob brought a to work" would mean two different things at different time points - in 2013 Bob brought a gun to work, and in 2023 Bob brought a water gun to work. Drastically different meanings, that are changed not because the author changed the text - but font designers changed how "U+1F52B" is rendered. https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/k1xxio/evolution_of_the_gun_emoji/ https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/k1xxio/evolutio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pistol_emoji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pistol_emoji
- Affric 2y ago
  It’s an interesting thought. China, at least in the late 20th C, offered many western travellers a glimpse into this idea whereby a local would realise they don’t speak their language and then attempt to make the characters to the westerner. With that said, alphabetic writing is an indirection whereby the writing stands for sounds which stand for the objects. Logographic writing can copy grammars but the symbols can be read as the objects themselves. I think it’s a simpler form of communication in some ways and if you were ever going to invent new characters when your language is “complete” you would probably do it in this manner.
- pflenker 2y ago
cubefox 2y ago
This doesn't discuss Internet forum software which allowed including "emojis" in text, via small predefined GIF images. Was this a later development? There were also instant messengers like ICQ and AIM, but they only came out in 1996/1997, and I don't know whether they had "emojis" from the start.
- msephton 2y ago
  It's a good point, but my research was specific to Japanese emoji, given they invented the word and their symbols are the ones that were adopted. I'd be interested to read a similar deep dive into forum/ICQ/AIM emoticon history. I only remember them from around year 2000 though I'd been an internet user since 1995.
  - msephton 2y ago
    Just checked and phpBB was released in year 2000.
- toast0 2y ago
  In that timeframe, those were emoticons or sometimes just smileys. Emoji and emoticons have a different background, and have a totally different etymology, despite sharing the first three letters and sharing some subjecy matter. I don't recall seeing much, if any, discussion of emoji until they rose to power towards the end of the 00s.
  - cubefox 2y ago
    That's just a terminological difference though. Both solve the same problem by inserting tiny faces into text.
    - layer8 2y ago
      The difference is that with emoticons you could invent your own combinations and variations. Different people would use different variations of basically the same emoticon. You could come up with new ones hat hadn’t been used before. With emojis, you have a fixed set, and it is what it is. Another difference is that emoticons blend in to the text visually. Your eyes aren’t draw to them like they are when you have a paragraph of text with colorful emoji sprinkled in-between, which can be much more jarring.
b33j0r 2y ago
Between ginger bill (the creator of odin lang) and gingerbeardman, nordic redness is really having its moment in the sun! Tim Minchin, we need you back to narrate.
- msephton 2y ago
  The funny thing is that I don't even have a ginger beard! It's a long story. — msephton aka gingerbeardman
totetsu 2y ago
Some of those very really ones are starting to look like karuta card symbols
twic 2y ago
> The characters ○金 and ○ビ were invented by the author Kazuhiro Watanabe in 1984 in his book Kinkonkan. These were quickly accepted into Japanese vocabulary, and they won a buzzword award at the time. And they are right there in the Sharp emoji, represented as characters enclosed in circles. They were in common use throughout Japan’s bubble-era, 1986-1991. The words eventually fell out of fashion and are now considered obsolete. What do these mean? What is this book? What is the story here?
- Anon1096 2y ago
  From: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%9B%B2%E3%81%BF%E6%96%87%E5%AD%97 https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%9B%B2%E3%81%BF%E6%96%87%E5... > 渡辺和博の『金魂巻』で、「丸金」（㊎、金持ち）と「丸ビ」（ビ⃝、貧乏）が使用され、これは流行語大賞を受賞した。 They mean rich and poor
  - kitten_mittens_ 2y ago
    Neither of these terms seem to exist on wiktionary.
    - msephton 2y ago
      These are individual characters that cannot be easily typed as they are enclosed in a circle and, as noted in the blog post, only included in some character sets for a limited time. Most commonly they are typed as a circle followed by the character as in ○ビ and ○金 (used in my blog post) or enclosed in brackets to approximate a circle as in（金）and（ビ）or you can type unicode joining character to have the characters overlap each other as at https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/囲み文字#仮名文字 https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/囲み文字#仮名文字 - https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/金 https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/金 - https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/び https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/び The characters that are circled are: - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/金#Japanese https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/金#Japanese - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ビ#Japanese https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ビ#Japanese This is somewhat related to the paragraph about Wikipedia that I put in the blog post. 1984 was very pre-internet and this stuff only happened in Japan. So, there are many references to Maru-kin ○金 and Maru-bi ○ビ in the book, and on the internet, and they're mentioned on Japanese wikipedia. But whether or not there's enough quality citations from verifiable sources to please English Wiktionary or Wikipedia is a battle I simply don't have the energy to get into these days. I'd encourage you to ask any sufficiently old Japanese person and they will let you know all about this era, and then gather enough quality cites. Unicode comes close for kin (metal/rich): - Circled https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+328E https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+328E - Parenthesized https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+322E https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+322E ...but not for bi (poor) After the book, and the 84年の日本流行語 (Japanese Buzzwords Award 1984), these symbols also featured in a movie based on the book - https://www.nikkatsu.com/movie/26211.html https://www.nikkatsu.com/movie/26211.html
aaronscott 2y ago
If you find this topic interesting, David Imel put together a fantastic deep dive. He spent four months of research, went to Japan to interview the creator of emoji, and put together a very good video on the topic[0]. [0] https://youtu.be/g-pG79LOtMw?si=htnop9jpjmE3kQ75 https://youtu.be/g-pG79LOtMw?si=htnop9jpjmE3kQ75
- msephton 2y ago
  It's a well produced video, I watched it and commented on it last week. At that point my blog post was half written but my research was already complete. I applaud David for going to Japan, great to see such dedication. My issue with the video is that it simply retreads the accepted timeline rather than doing any critical research. He was in Japan and could have done some real digging, you know? What was he doing for four months? Just editing the video? I don't know. So, I think the content of the video is not a deep dive at all, as it doesn't uncover anything new. None of the stuff I uncovered for my blog post is covered. And we can now see more clearly than ever that Shigetaka Kurita is not the creator of emoji, but rather the creator of the most well-know set of emoji that was perhaps the first use of the sparkle emoji. That's a pretty big difference. BTW my research was conducted in my free time over less than two weeks. It consisted of some googling, talking with Japanese friends, reading Japanese wikipedia (with browser translation, as can't read it natively) and that is all from the comfort of my own desk. So I would say anybody is capable of having done this. Of course, I had the bonus of being clued in that earlier history existed thanks to the device I had in my hands. But my point is that we should always question sources and accepted history, because more often than not there's additional story to be told.
  - mobiledev2014 2y ago
    Too humble- I'm consistently impressed by your posts that show up on HN. The type of "do what you find interesting" we should all aspire to, cheers!
    - msephton 2y ago
      Many thanks! Appreciate it. If only to prove I'm not wasting my time (or, wasting it in the best way)

141 points by simonpure 2y ago

fouc 2y ago

Honestly, I kinda feel like emojis don't technically start until they actually showed up with multiple colors & some sense of depth / 3d-like look.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
msephton 2y ago
When would that be?
kergonath 2y ago
Why, though? I don’t think 2D versus pseudo-3D is a significant difference. They are still used the same way, in the same contexts, and mean the same thing. Also, a lot of the common representations went back to flat, or never made it to 3D in the first place.
deruta 2y ago
I concur. Consider TFA. The symbols are not converted to from ASCII smileys and are used like an extension of the charset. Conversely, I remember web chatrooms in the mid-00s, where a colon-paren would always be converted to the service's pallette's rendition of an emoticon, pretty color and 3D to beat. Plus, there's a question of how people use them, but that distinction I think came later
- msephton 2y ago
  Interesting to note that I can still type colon-paren today and have it converted, but usually to an emoji instead of the forum smiley gif. On Discord, GitHub, etc

gumby 2y ago

This is great work. I remember seeing them on my keitai mid 90s but feeling that they were familiar. So filling in some gaps like this helps me not feel like I was crazy.

msephton 2y ago
Happy to have helped put your mind at ease!

tkgally 2y ago

One of the things that has fascinated me about emoji is that they are a type of character that had been largely unfamiliar to most of the world: ideograms. While their emergence in a country with a well-established ideographic writing system—Japan, kanji—may not be surprising, their widespread adoption in places that had basically used only alphabets is, at least to me. I wonder to what extent emoji use might evolve so that people without a common spoken language can use them to communicate with each other, the way classical Chinese has historically been used in East Asia. Judging from some emoji-filled comment sections I’ve seen on streaming platforms, it seems that that evolution may have already begun.

legostormtroopr 2y ago
I would be worried about such an environment where emojis were a serious communication mechanism. Both from a risk of misinterpretation and the fact that language could be changed by font designers. At present date there is no way to say "gun" in emoji, and even worse so the phrase "Bob brought a to work" would mean two different things at different time points - in 2013 Bob brought a gun to work, and in 2023 Bob brought a water gun to work. Drastically different meanings, that are changed not because the author changed the text - but font designers changed how "U+1F52B" is rendered. https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/k1xxio/evolution_of_the_gun_emoji/ https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/k1xxio/evolutio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pistol_emoji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pistol_emoji
Affric 2y ago
It’s an interesting thought. China, at least in the late 20th C, offered many western travellers a glimpse into this idea whereby a local would realise they don’t speak their language and then attempt to make the characters to the westerner. With that said, alphabetic writing is an indirection whereby the writing stands for sounds which stand for the objects. Logographic writing can copy grammars but the symbols can be read as the objects themselves. I think it’s a simpler form of communication in some ways and if you were ever going to invent new characters when your language is “complete” you would probably do it in this manner.
pflenker 2y ago

cubefox 2y ago

This doesn't discuss Internet forum software which allowed including "emojis" in text, via small predefined GIF images. Was this a later development? There were also instant messengers like ICQ and AIM, but they only came out in 1996/1997, and I don't know whether they had "emojis" from the start.

msephton 2y ago
It's a good point, but my research was specific to Japanese emoji, given they invented the word and their symbols are the ones that were adopted. I'd be interested to read a similar deep dive into forum/ICQ/AIM emoticon history. I only remember them from around year 2000 though I'd been an internet user since 1995.
- msephton 2y ago
  Just checked and phpBB was released in year 2000.
toast0 2y ago
In that timeframe, those were emoticons or sometimes just smileys. Emoji and emoticons have a different background, and have a totally different etymology, despite sharing the first three letters and sharing some subjecy matter. I don't recall seeing much, if any, discussion of emoji until they rose to power towards the end of the 00s.
- cubefox 2y ago
  That's just a terminological difference though. Both solve the same problem by inserting tiny faces into text.
  - layer8 2y ago
    The difference is that with emoticons you could invent your own combinations and variations. Different people would use different variations of basically the same emoticon. You could come up with new ones hat hadn’t been used before. With emojis, you have a fixed set, and it is what it is. Another difference is that emoticons blend in to the text visually. Your eyes aren’t draw to them like they are when you have a paragraph of text with colorful emoji sprinkled in-between, which can be much more jarring.

b33j0r 2y ago

Between ginger bill (the creator of odin lang) and gingerbeardman, nordic redness is really having its moment in the sun! Tim Minchin, we need you back to narrate.

msephton 2y ago
The funny thing is that I don't even have a ginger beard! It's a long story. — msephton aka gingerbeardman

totetsu 2y ago

Some of those very really ones are starting to look like karuta card symbols

twic 2y ago

> The characters ○金 and ○ビ were invented by the author Kazuhiro Watanabe in 1984 in his book Kinkonkan. These were quickly accepted into Japanese vocabulary, and they won a buzzword award at the time. And they are right there in the Sharp emoji, represented as characters enclosed in circles. They were in common use throughout Japan’s bubble-era, 1986-1991. The words eventually fell out of fashion and are now considered obsolete. What do these mean? What is this book? What is the story here?

Anon1096 2y ago
From: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%9B%B2%E3%81%BF%E6%96%87%E5%AD%97 https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%9B%B2%E3%81%BF%E6%96%87%E5... > 渡辺和博の『金魂巻』で、「丸金」（㊎、金持ち）と「丸ビ」（ビ⃝、貧乏）が使用され、これは流行語大賞を受賞した。 They mean rich and poor
- kitten_mittens_ 2y ago
  Neither of these terms seem to exist on wiktionary.
  - msephton 2y ago
    These are individual characters that cannot be easily typed as they are enclosed in a circle and, as noted in the blog post, only included in some character sets for a limited time. Most commonly they are typed as a circle followed by the character as in ○ビ and ○金 (used in my blog post) or enclosed in brackets to approximate a circle as in（金）and（ビ）or you can type unicode joining character to have the characters overlap each other as at https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/囲み文字#仮名文字 https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/囲み文字#仮名文字 - https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/金 https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/金 - https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/び https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/び The characters that are circled are: - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/金#Japanese https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/金#Japanese - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ビ#Japanese https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ビ#Japanese This is somewhat related to the paragraph about Wikipedia that I put in the blog post. 1984 was very pre-internet and this stuff only happened in Japan. So, there are many references to Maru-kin ○金 and Maru-bi ○ビ in the book, and on the internet, and they're mentioned on Japanese wikipedia. But whether or not there's enough quality citations from verifiable sources to please English Wiktionary or Wikipedia is a battle I simply don't have the energy to get into these days. I'd encourage you to ask any sufficiently old Japanese person and they will let you know all about this era, and then gather enough quality cites. Unicode comes close for kin (metal/rich): - Circled https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+328E https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+328E - Parenthesized https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+322E https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+322E ...but not for bi (poor) After the book, and the 84年の日本流行語 (Japanese Buzzwords Award 1984), these symbols also featured in a movie based on the book - https://www.nikkatsu.com/movie/26211.html https://www.nikkatsu.com/movie/26211.html

aaronscott 2y ago

If you find this topic interesting, David Imel put together a fantastic deep dive. He spent four months of research, went to Japan to interview the creator of emoji, and put together a very good video on the topic[0]. [0] https://youtu.be/g-pG79LOtMw?si=htnop9jpjmE3kQ75 https://youtu.be/g-pG79LOtMw?si=htnop9jpjmE3kQ75

msephton 2y ago
It's a well produced video, I watched it and commented on it last week. At that point my blog post was half written but my research was already complete. I applaud David for going to Japan, great to see such dedication. My issue with the video is that it simply retreads the accepted timeline rather than doing any critical research. He was in Japan and could have done some real digging, you know? What was he doing for four months? Just editing the video? I don't know. So, I think the content of the video is not a deep dive at all, as it doesn't uncover anything new. None of the stuff I uncovered for my blog post is covered. And we can now see more clearly than ever that Shigetaka Kurita is not the creator of emoji, but rather the creator of the most well-know set of emoji that was perhaps the first use of the sparkle emoji. That's a pretty big difference. BTW my research was conducted in my free time over less than two weeks. It consisted of some googling, talking with Japanese friends, reading Japanese wikipedia (with browser translation, as can't read it natively) and that is all from the comfort of my own desk. So I would say anybody is capable of having done this. Of course, I had the bonus of being clued in that earlier history existed thanks to the device I had in my hands. But my point is that we should always question sources and accepted history, because more often than not there's additional story to be told.
- mobiledev2014 2y ago
  Too humble- I'm consistently impressed by your posts that show up on HN. The type of "do what you find interesting" we should all aspire to, cheers!
  - msephton 2y ago
    Many thanks! Appreciate it. If only to prove I'm not wasting my time (or, wasting it in the best way)