Starting from a smiley face, emojis change over 40 years
You might often use emojis when you talk to your friends online. But did you know when emojis came into our lives?
Before emojis, emoticons first appeared . Scott Fahlman was a teacher at Carnegie Mellon University, US. On Sept 19, 1982, he made history by posting online. Guinness World Records called it the “first digital emoticon”.
Over the past 40 years, emoticons and later emojis became central to our online chats. GIFs and memes also appeared. Now there are 3,600 emojis for us to show our feelings, according to CNN.
Emojis are like our body language online. When we can’t find the right words, emojis can help. They make our chats more effective . According to a 2017 study, emojis help us get the same happiness from online talks that we get from talking in person. Our brain “sees” them as language.
Emojis change, too! Unicode brings new emojis every year. And it cares about race , gender and other things. In 2015, for example, it brought out emojis with different skin tones . In 2016, emojis about different jobs came out, with women’s versions of them.
Different kinds of emojis
Emoticon
It makes a picture by putting punctuation and other elements together.
Emojis
Emoji is a Japanese word. It translates in English as “e” for “picture” and “moji” for “character . The most common emojis are the yellow faces with different expressions.
Memes
Memes are funny videos, pictures, or phrases that are popular online.
GIFs
GIFs are looping animation images .
