Emoji

Back in 2015, Jennifer Lee was texting with her friend when they noticed something was missing from their iPhones.

LEE: We were texting about dumplings because that is what we do, as Chinese-ish women. And I sent her a picture of a dumpling. She sent me back a bunch of emoji, which is like, “Yum, yum yum yum, yum yum yum! Knife and fork, knife and fork, knife and fork!” And then there’s like this pause and she’s like, “Oh, Apple doesn’t have a dumpling emoji.” And I was like, “Huh, that’s really strange.” Because every culture basically has their equivalent of yummy goodness inside a carbohydrate shell. You know — empanadas, pierogi, ravioli, khinkali, pelmeni. Dumplings are universal. Emoji were also universal. How is there no dumpling emoji? Like, clearly the world is broken. 

And that discovery raised a question that Lee had never thought about before.

LEE: I was like, “Where do emoji come from?”

By one estimate, we send around 10 billion emoji every day — in text messages, social media posts, dating apps, emails, and workplace chatrooms. That’s around 115,000 of them every second. And the craze extends beyond the keyboard. There are emoji plush toys, stickers, books, jewelry — even an emoji movie that grossed more than $200 million dollars at the box office. Most of us instantly recognize the laughing face, the pile of poop, the eggplant, and the skull. But it’s less known who decides which emoji make it onto our phones, who designs them, and how they’re changing the way we communicate.

LEE: I would argue that emoji are our first natively digital communication form. You have kids who can read and write emoji before they can read and write their native language. They can send something to grandma at like age two.

For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is The Economics of Everyday Things. I’m Zachary Crockett. Today: emoji.

*      *      *

Jennifer Lee is a person who takes her curiosity to an extreme. After she got angry about that missing dumpling, she became obsessed with emoji. She co-founded Emojination, a collective that advocates for new designs. She launched an emoji conference called Emojicon. And she became involved with the Unicode Consortium, the organization responsible for approving and standardizing emoji.

LEE: So, all emoji all the time. 

Lee says, before emoji there were emoticons.

LEE: They basically are facial expressions that are denoted through punctuation. So, semi-colon parentheses for winking face or like colon, capital P for, like, sticking out the tongue.

The first emoticons were used in print back in the 1880s. But it wasn’t until the 1980s that a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon sent the first digital emoticon — a sideways smiley face.

LEE: When you get into the world of communicating through email and then AOL Instant Messenger, in the 90s, then conversation gets transmitted through text rather than through voice. And then these emoticons were used to sort of give more context to those more casual conversations.

In 1999, a team of designers at the Japanese cell carrier NTT DoCoMo took things a step further. They created a set of 176 12-by-12-pixel icons designed to be used on pagers and cell phones — hearts, moons, cars, planes, and drinks. These new icons were called emoji — a combination of the Japanese words for picture and character.

LEE: And then the other carriers created their own. But the tricky thing is they weren’t interoperable. So if you were a DoCoMo, you could basically only message using those emoji with people who were also DoCoMo.

As emoji grew in popularity in Japan, American tech companies decided to get in on the trend.

LEE: You had Google and Apple bringing their operating systems on their phones into Japan. And Japanese people felt really, really strongly that they had to have emoji. You get into a situation where, okay, now, instead of being only used on a phone as part of maybe a simple text message, you had to have the emoji move from the keyboard to email. So suddenly, you have this need for them to be interoperable.

It was a big problem that each carrier had its own encoding system. When you sent a winky face from an iPhone to your friend’s Samsung phone, they’d see an empty box, or a square with a question mark inside, or nothing at all. So, technologists turned to the Unicode Consortium.

LEE: Most of what Unicode did historically was they took languages, Arabic, or Aramaic, or Hebrew, or Chinese, or Korean, or Russian. And then they took these writing systems and then just created a standardized encoding system across everything. So one code to rule them all kind of thing. That’s why it’s called Unicode. In 2007, there were a bunch of engineers that brought a proposal to Unicode to standardize emoji.

That proposal was accepted — and today, Unicode publishes a set of standards for emoji, just as it does for the sets of characters that we use to write English, or Japanese, or Arabic. The committee is largely controlled by tech companies — Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Adobe — which each pay a $50,000 annual membership for voting rights. These companies’ primary concern is ensuring that text works properly across devices, and that the standards are responsive to their technical needs. But they also have the right to decide which emoji should be included on our devices. Every year they vote on proposed new emoji. The ones that are approved are awarded a digital code that’s recognized across devices and platforms.

LEE: So basically, all digital characters have a tiny piece of character real estate. Like, imagine you have a city full of addresses and every character gets its own little tiny address, which is just a sequence of zeros and ones. When you are sending emoji, you’re not sending a picture, you are literally sending a little string of zeros and ones. So you pick the poo emoji onto your phone and then you send it to someone and as it goes it’s zeros and ones, right? And on the other side, if they have a different device, or if they are on a laptop or a tablet, they are getting those zeros and ones — they’re not getting a picture. They’re getting zeros and the ones, they’re looking up those zeros and ones in their emoji font, and — boop!

This code makes sure that your friend’s Samsung knows that the emoji you sent from your iPhone was a winky face. That doesn’t mean that the winky face she sees looks exactly like the one you sent. Because, while Unicode decides which emoji get digital codes, each device maker is responsible for designing its own take on them.

LEE: One of the most interesting things in these big tech companies is where the emoji group rolls up to, right? So in some cases, it rolls up into the mobile platform division. In some places it rolls up until little iconography design. In other cases, it rolls into marketing, which is the strangest place for emoji to roll up to. It really says a lot about an organization and how they think about emoji by like which org it is within the tech company.

At Apple, the original set of icons, which debuted in 2008, was largely created by a design intern named Angela Guzman.

She spent 3 months carefully considering everything from the leather stitch on the football to the freckles on the eggplant. Google has its own design team, and its own aesthetic — although in recent years its emoji have become more like other companies’.

These tech companies don’t get any revenue from the work they put into emoji. But users like them — and there is an incentive to constantly add new ones.

LEE: The annual-ish upgrade of emoji forces people to upgrade their operating systems on their phones, which is often how you get security patches through. So emoji often forces waves of security updates through the world.

So, how does a new emoji make it onto the world’s smartphones? And how are these little icons changing the way we communicate? That’s coming up.

*      *      *

Most proposals for new emoji come from the voting members of the Unicode Consortium — the big tech companies. But normal people also get to weigh in.

LEE: The Unicode Consortium takes in proposals from the public. We’re actually in the midst of emoji proposal season.

CROCKETT: There’s a season?

LEE: Yes, it’s basically beginning of April to the end of July every year. People can send in their emoji proposals. And then they’re considered by the committee. And then through lots of rigorous debate and deliberation, and then a certain subset of them are encoded every year in the Unicode update. 

Lee is a member of The Emoji Standard & Research Working Group at Unicode. And she says there are a few criteria a new emoji has to meet. Certain things are outright banned.

LEE: Anything that is trademarked, so no McDonald’s arches, no Nike swish, none of that. No deities and no living-people-type emoji. Those are like, not gonna happen.

Then, there are a series of practical questions.

LEE: Is it visually distinctive? Is there a sufficient demand for this visual iconography? Is this already used in certain kinds of situations? There was also often a completeness kind of set. This is really important for, like, the orange heart because there was, like, red heart, yellow heart, green heart, blue heart, purple heart, black heart, I think. There was no orange heart and people would use a pumpkin. So that was a really big argument for it.

Sometimes, a second iteration of an emoji is created because the existing one doesn’t quite fit the bill. Take, for instance, the mushroom emoji. The original design, which debuted in 2010, is red and white, which is often poisonous in the wild. An argument was raised that there should be an edible mushroom, and Unicode ended up introducing a brown version in 2023.

If a proposal is seriously considered, Unicode will advance it to a design mock-up stage. They might consult experts in whatever field the emoji is related to. If it’s a depiction of a temple, they’ll talk with religious leaders to make sure it’s accurately portrayed. And in some cases, they’ll run into problems with ideas that… seem innocent on paper.

LEE: One that I thought would never see the light of day, cause it had this very interesting path was the mousetrap emoji. PETA — People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals — wrote a letter to the Unicode Consortium complaining about how this was cruel, you know, these kinds of devices broke limbs. So the tech companies redesigned the mousetrap emoji to basically a cardboard box propped up with a stick and a piece of cheese underneath it. Like, literally who builds a mousetrap like that? I’m like, “Oh my God, no one’s ever going to use this.” And then I was talking to someone, they’re like, “Oh, no., you see it all over Twitter.” And then I looked and people use it for thirst traps. So there are all these selfies of people at the mirror, half naked with the mousetrap emoji on it, which is ridiculous for so many reasons. But I was like, “Every emoji has its day.” Who are we to judge?

There are now nearly 3,800 Unicode-approved emoji. But in any given year, only a few new proposals from the public make it through.

LEE: There are probably four to five hundred emoji proposals submitted each cycle and maybe like four to eight make it out. I mean, it’s infinitesimally small.

It can take nearly a year for a new emoji to be approved by Unicode, and then up to another year for all the tech companies to create their own designs and roll them out on their devices. Users sometimes have strong reactions to those designs.

LEE: Apple did a bagel emoji with, like, no cream cheese. And people were like, “What is this?” And then they introduced one with cream cheese. 

Emoji might also get subtle updates based on current events.

LEE: The syringe used to be bloody and then we went through COVID and suddenly we were like, no blood in the syringes. The most dramatic one obviously is a gun emoji, which was a gun. And then Apple decided, just kidding, we’re going to make it a green water gun. And then everyone kind of came along, made it a Green Water Gun. And then Elon bought Twitter and they’re like, “Nope, I’m going to make a back into a gun-gun.” And so Twitter has a gun-gun, while everyone else now still has a colorful water pistol.

Lee says that flag emojis pose a particular challenge.

LEE: Unicode takes very little responsibility for flags. Basically, they just follow a country code as recognized by the UN.

CROCKETT: Unicode’s trying to stay out of politics, basically.

LEE: Well, they shouldn’t be deciding what is a country. Someone else decides that.

Flags make up a large portion of the emoji keyboard. There are more than 250 of them in Apple’s library. But they’re used a lot less than some other popular emoji. For years, the most widely-used emoji was the face with tears of joy. It was even named word of the year in 2015 by Oxford Dictionaries. But a recent analysis of social media posts shows that the title might now belong to the loudly-crying face. That shift may be a sign of our times. Because, as it turns out, the emoji we use can tell us a lot about public sentiment.

LEE: Like, in the same way that gestures or facial expression are meant to complement literal words, emoji convey meaning. So you could tell if someone was being sarcastic, or playful.

In the field of linguistics, emoji are what scholars call a paralanguage. They’re used to communicate things that can get lost in written text. Sometimes, they can change the entire meaning of a message. A text that says, “I hate you” reads differently when it’s partnered with a laughing-face emoji.

But emoji aren’t just used to convey emotion. They’re designed to be pictograms — literal representations of objects. To the Unicode Consortium, an eggplant is just an eggplant. In practice, though, emoji are often used as ideograms — symbols that represent a concept.

LEE: A skull means, like, laughing myself to death. Like, “Oh, it was so funny, I could die.” Or there’s spill the tea, like, “Oh, what’s the tea?”

More than 60 percent of younger people say they process information faster when it’s presented in visual form. Corporate America has tried to latch onto this trend. You can order food from Domino’s by texting them a pizza emoji. And many companies now use emoji in email subject lines to boost their open rates. Lee says that brands are also constantly trying to influence the new emoji that Unicode rolls out.

LEE: We get a lot of proposals from brands. Some of them are terrible. Some of them are good. Ford had someone do a pickup truck emoji. Timberland helped with the boot emoji. Tinder helped with the interracial couple emoji. You know, white wine emoji — there was a big push from the white wine people, because they feel like it’s very qualitatively different than red wine.

But the emoji that tend to make it through usually start with a genuine desire to see a beloved object represented. That was the case for Jennifer Lee. After she realized that there was no dumpling emoji back in 2015, she and some friends submitted a proposal. It made its way through Unicode’s process and was approved. A year later, it was on her phone.

LEE: It was just amazing. It was so lifelike. It was unambiguously a realistic rendition of a boiled dumpling and not like, oh, some kind of carby thing with creases. How often do you get to say I’ve impacted billions of people? I mean, in a tiny, tiny, tiny little way, but still like across billions of people. It’s kind of cool.

For The Economics of Everyday Things, I’m Zachary Crockett.

*      *      *

This episode was produced by me and Sarah Lilley, and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Daniel Moritz-Rabson.

LEE: Someone sends you red heart, brown heart, yellow heart, you know, like chirp, chirp, chirp. And you’re just like, this is ridiculous.