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You might use this 100 times a day, depending on your age:



You probably type it as a colon followed by a parenthesis, like this:

: )

That may not have been part of your "vocabulary" 25 years ago but chances are, it is now. In fact, you've probably been exposed to all manner of "emoticons" starting with the humble smiley. Still, they all entered your consciousness in the last decade or two, and you probably think that's when they were invented. Sure, some of the more complex ones like the kitty face >^o,o^< are pretty new, but take a look at this poem that dates back to 1648…

Tumble me down, and I will sit
Upon my ruins, (smiling yet: )
Tear me to tatters, yet I'll be
Patient in my necessity.
Laugh at my scraps of clothes, and shun
Me, as a fear'd infection;
Yet, scare-crow-like, I'll walk as one
Neglecting thy derision.

But let's be honest, it was just a coincidence.

It turns out according to an article from 2014, it's not really history's first emoticon, at least not intentionally. The intentional use of the emoticon does have a verifiable birthday, though, and it's September 19, 1982. You can read the post where it was proposed here. Luckily, it's been archived so future scholars can The author is Scott Fahlman, a research professor at Carnegie Mellon at the time. He makes a brief, but quite serious, proposal on the use of punctuation to convey humor:

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)From: Scott E Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: : – )

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use : - (

Click to expand...

Simple, economical, brilliant. And, it was the beginning of all emoji and emoticons that have followed.

The first actual emoji, in other words pictures as opposed to combinations of punctuation marks, were invented in 1999 by a telephone engineer named Shigetaka Kurita. One of the goals at that time was to make it easier for people to send information over simple text messages. At the time, typing took a lot more work and the limit for one message was much shorter.

Speaking of which, what's the difference between an emoticon and an emoji?

Here, I'm going to lean on an a Wired article from 2018. Emoticons are those things which are made of different characters that you can find on a regular computer keyboard. Our smiley face, , is one. They get increasingly complicated from there.

However, an emoji is technically something else. An emoji is a separate character. You can't type it on most computer keyboards, although most phones give you a way to input them directly. That's right, is a letter in an alphabet that's much larger than you realize.

How emoji became standardized

We're obviously familiar with the letters and numbers on a typical keyboard. In the early days of the computer, that's all there were. As early as the 1980s, computer scientists had a goal to unify all the world's lettering systems into one single code. No matter if you typed "excellent" or "отличный" or "ممتاز", the goal was to be able to represent all of that with one single font. As someone who used to have to typeset different languages in different fonts, let me tell you it's a great ide.

The first edition of what we now know as Unicode was published in 1991. It took 20 years or so before Unicode was fully implemented in computers and phones, though. By that time, it was clear that in addition to all the world's alphabets, we also needed to add "emoji," the little pictures that people used all the time to convey emotion.

The first version of the Unicode standard to include emoji was back in 2010. Since then, the Unicode consortium has added a few more every year or so, to create an incredibly complex vocabulary. Different device makers are free to create custom emoji as long as the overall message is clear. That's why some emoji look a little different on an iPhone than they do on an Android, and why the ones you see in Windows are sometimes a little weak.

It's more than I expected

I set out to write a short article about smiley faces. Instead I realized there's a whole story behind them. I guess all I can say about that is…



The post Someone INVENTED it: Emoticon appeared first on The Solid Signal Blog.

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