Yesterday, as part of our World Emoji Day 2025 celebrations, we published a detailed history of the Twemoji emoji design set. Now, we’re discussing broader emoji history with Keith Houston, author of the newly released "Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji".

This week, it was announced that Docomo’s emoji designs will no longer appear on any of the Japanese mobile network’s devices. This marks the end of an emoji era that first began in 1999, even though the set hasn't been updated since 2013.

In 2019 Emojipedia detailed a historic revelation: Docomo’s i-mode emojis from 20 years prior were not the first to exist. Now, in 2024, further digital excavations have led to the recreation of "emoji" designs that predate both Softbank’s 1997 emoji set and the ❤-enabled Pocket Bell pagers of 1995.

Since updating the Emojipedia archives with the SoftBank emoji set from 1997 [https://blog.emojipedia.org/correcting-the-record-on-the-first-emoji-set/], it's a good time to now show how this original set of 90 emojis released over two decades ago has a direct lineage to the emoji set used on iOS today.

Until now, Japanese phone carrier Docomo has most often been widely [https://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2014/03/26/meet-shigetaka-kurita-the-father-of-emoji/] credited [https://www.theverge.com/2013/3/4/3966140/how-emoji-conquered-the-world] as the originator of what we know as emoji today. It turns out, that might not be the case, and

On November 21, 2008 Apple released a free software update for iPhone users in Japan which contained Apple's first emoji font and keyboard. Ten years later, it's clear that this release paved the way for the widespread emoji support we see around the world today. Background

In the beginning Shigetaka Kurita[1] created emoji on NTT Docomo phones in Japan. Now the emoji was limited and small, text was still pervasive, and the upcoming influence of the people was hovering over the waters. Editor's Note: This is an outdated overview of the creation of