Available in | 19 languages |
---|---|
Editor | Keith Broni |
Parent | Zedge |
URL | emojipedia |
Launched | 2013 |
Emojipedia is an emoji reference website [1] which documents the meaning and common usage of emoji characters [2] in the Unicode Standard. Most commonly described as an emoji encyclopedia [3] or emoji dictionary, [4] Emojipedia also publishes articles and provides tools for tracking new emoji characters, design changes [5] and usage trends. [6] [7] It has been owned by Zedge since 2021. [8] [9]
Emojipedia is a non-voting associate member of The Unicode Consortium. [10] [11]
Jeremy Burge [12] created Emojipedia in 2013, [13] and told the Hackney Gazette "the idea came about when Apple added emojis to iOS 6, but failed to mention which ones were new". [14]
Emojipedia rose to prominence with the release of Unicode 7 in 2014, when The Register reported the "online encyclopedia of emojis has been chucked offline after vast numbers of people visited the site" [15] in relation to the downtime experienced by the site at the time.
In 2015, Emojipedia entered its first partnership with Quartz to release an app that allowed users access previously-hidden country flag emojis on iOS. [16]
Emojipedia told Business Insider in early 2016 that it served "over 140 million page views" per year, and was profitable. [17] In mid-2016, Emojipedia "urged Apple to rethink its plan to convert the handgun emoji symbol into a water pistol icon" citing cross-platform confusion. [18]
In 2017, The Library of Congress launched the Web Cultures Web Archive [19] which featured a history of memes, gifs, and emojis from references including Emojipedia, Boing Boing and GIPHY. [20]
The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the site served 23 million page views in October 2017. [21] Total page views for 2013–2019 were said to have reached one billion by February 2019. [22] The New Yorker reported Emojipedia served 50 million page views in April 2020. [23]
In August 2021, Emojipedia was acquired by Zedge for an undisclosed amount. [24]
In February 2022, Keith Broni became Emojipedia's editor-in-chief, taking over from founder and chief emoji officer Jeremy Burge. [25] The Washington Post described Broni as having "spent years researching social media sites to better understand how people employ emojis". [26]
In July 2022, Emojipedia added multi-language support for the first time by localizing the site into five languages. [27] In October 2022, support for 13 more languages (including India's most spoken languages in celebration of Diwali) was introduced. [28]
In 2016 an Emojipedia analysis [29] showed that the peach emoji [30] is most commonly used to represent buttocks. [31]
According to Emojipedia Broccoli [32] was approved as part of Unicode 10.0 in 2017, this vibrant vegetable has since become a symbol of health, wellness, and yes, even the occasional debate about eating habits. But it hasn’t always been a beloved symbol in the emoji world. In fact, it took several years for the broccoli emoji to gain the popularity it enjoys today. [33]
In 2017, after Google CEO Sundar Pichai pledged to "drop everything" to update Android's burger emoji, [34] Emojipedia revealed [35] the cheese layering issue had been resolved. [36] [37] [38]
In 2018, Emojipedia revealed [39] that Apple planned to "fix" its bagel emoji [40] design [41] by adding cream cheese, [42] following user complaints. [43]
A 2020 study by Emojipedia [44] found that U+1F637😷FACE WITH MEDICAL MASK [45] and U+1F9A0🦠MICROBE [46] were most used to represent COVID-19. [47] [48] Also in 2020, Emojipedia revealed [49] that Apple's forthcoming iOS update would change the mask-wearing emoji [50] to display a smiling face. [51] [52] [53]
In January 2021, Emojipedia reported that U+1F602😂FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY had been declared an emoji "for boomers" [54] [55] on TikTok, and in March 2021, it published analysis showing U+1F62D😭LOUDLY CRYING FACE had become the most used emoji on Twitter. [56] [57]
World Emoji Day is a holiday created by Emojipedia [58] in 2014 [59] which is held on 17 July each year. [60] According to The New York Times , 17 July was chosen due to the design of the calendar emoji (on iOS) showing this date. [61] [62]
Emojipedia used the second annual World Emoji Day to release EmojiVote as "an experiment in Emoji democracy". [63] In 2017–2020, Apple used this event to preview new emojis for iOS. [64] [65] [66] Emojipedia reveals the winners of the World Emoji Awards each year, with past announcements held live at the New York Stock Exchange [67] and National Museum of Cinema. [68]
Emojipedia launched Adopt an Emoji in September 2015 as "an attempt to make the site free of display ads" according to Wired. [69] This preceded a similar program by the Unicode Consortium in December 2015. [70]
The Emojipedia "Adopt an Emoji" program was shut down in November 2016, citing confusion for users and advertisers due to the similarity with Unicode's fundraising effort. [71]
In 2018, Portland Maine's Press Herald reported that Senator Angus King had endorsed a new lobster emoji [72] but Emojipedia's design was called out as "anatomically incorrect" due to an incorrect number of legs. [73] The number of legs on Emojipedia's lobster design was subsequently fixed in a future release. Slate reported this as "a victory for scientists and lobster fans everywhere". [74]
Skater Tony Hawk criticized Emojipedia's skateboard design as being "'mid-'80s ... beginner-level' board 'definitely not representative' of the modern sport" and subsequently worked with the company to produce an updated design. [75]
On BBC Radio 4, Stephen Fry described Emojipedia as "a kind of Académie française for your iPhone" when assessing its impact on the English language. [76]
In 2018, Emojipedia was presented in the Federal Court of Australia as "a reputable website in telling us how to interpret these faces" by a lawyer for Geoffrey Rush during a defamation case against Nationwide News. This was in the context of interpreting an emoji sent by Rush to a fellow actor, which Rush described as "the looniest emoji I could find". [77] Rush said he would have used an emoji of Groucho Marx or The Muppets' Fozzie Bear if they had been available. [78] Reports indicate Rush's lawyer "attempted to hand up to Justice Michael Wigney a printout of the emoji's meaning from Emojipedia" but a barrister for Nationwide News objected, stating it "doesn't matter what Emojipedia says the emoji is". Justice Wigney agreed that an emoji definition "is in the eye of the beholder": inferring the context within the message was more important than the Emojipedia definition. [79]
The Unicode Consortium is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization incorporated and based in Mountain View, California, U.S. Its primary purpose is to maintain and publish the Unicode Standard which was developed with the intention of replacing existing character encoding schemes which are limited in size and scope, and are incompatible with multilingual environments.
An emoji is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram, or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of modern emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed conversation as well as to replace words as part of a logographic system. Emoji exist in various genres, including facial expressions, expressions, activity, food and drinks, celebrations, flags, objects, symbols, places, types of weather, animals and nature.
The zero-width joiner is a non-printing character used in the computerized typesetting of writing systems in which the shape or positioning of a grapheme depends on its relation to other graphemes, such as the Arabic script or any Indic script. Sometimes the Roman script is to be counted as complex, e.g. when using a Fraktur typeface. When placed between two characters that would otherwise not be connected, a ZWJ causes them to be printed in their connected forms.
Groucho glasses, also known as nose glasses, the beaglepuss, or the GM 20/20s, are a humorous novelty disguise which function as a caricature of the stage makeup used by the comedian Groucho Marx in his movies and vaudeville performances. They typically consist of black frames with attached features including bushy eyebrows, a large plastic nose, bushy moustache, and sometimes a plastic cigar. Considered one of the most iconic and widely used of all novelty items in the world, Groucho glasses were marketed as early as the 1940s and are instantly recognizable to people throughout the world. The glasses are often used as a shorthand for slapstick and are depicted in the Disguised Face (🥸) emoji.
Zedge is a content distribution platform that provides consumers with a way to personalize their mobile devices. It has offices in Trondheim, Vilnius, and New York City.
Pile of Poo (💩), also known informally as the poomoji (slang), poop emoji, or poo emoji, is an emoji resembling a coiled pile of feces, usually adorned with cartoon eyes and a large smile. Originated from Japan, it is used as an expression of various contexts. Some possible uses include: as a response of passive aggressive emotion, for comedic value, as commentary on what's bad, or as its literal meaning.
Apple Color Emoji is a color typeface used on Apple platforms such as iOS and macOS to display Emoji characters.
Noto is a font family comprising over 100 individual computer fonts, which are together designed to cover all the scripts encoded in the Unicode standard. As of October 2016, Noto fonts cover all 93 scripts defined in Unicode version 6.1, although fewer than 30,000 of the nearly 75,000 CJK unified ideographs in version 6.0 are covered. In total, Noto fonts cover over 77,000 characters, which is around half of the 149,186 characters defined in Unicode 15.0.
Jeremy Burge is an Australian emoji historian, founder of Emojipedia, creator of World Emoji Day and widely regarded as an expert on emoji.
Face with Tears of Joy (😂) is an emoji that represents a crying with laughter facial expression. While it is broadly referred to as an emoji, since it is used to demonstrate emotion, it is also referred to as an emoticon. Since the emoji has evolved from numerous different designs pre-unicode, it has different names and meanings in different regions and cultures. It is also known as Tears of Joy emoji, lol emoji, joy emoji, laughing emoji, cry-laugh emoji, crying laughing emoji, or the laughing crying emoji. The emoji is used in communication to portray joking and teasing on messaging platforms including Apple's iMessage and Meta's WhatsApp, as well as Social media websites such as Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, and Instagram. The emoji is one of the most commonly used emojis in the Emoticons Unicode block. The Oxford Dictionary recognized the emoji as its Word of the Year in 2015 due to its popular usage, and regarded it as the most popular emoji.
World Emoji Day is an annual unofficial holiday occurring on 17 July each year, intended to celebrate emoji; in the years since the earliest observance, it has become a popular date to make product or other announcements and releases relating to emoji.
The Eggplant emoji (🍆), also known by its Unicode name of Aubergine, is an emoji featuring a purple eggplant. Social media users have noted the emoji's phallic appearance and often use it as a euphemistic or suggestive icon during sexting conversations, to represent a penis. It is frequently paired and often contrasted with the peach emoji (🍑), representing the buttocks.
Charlie Craggs is a British transgender actress, activist, and author from London.
Shigetaka Kurita is a Japanese interface designer often cited for his early work with emoji sets. Many refer to him as the creator of the emoji, a claim that has been clarified in recent years. He was part of the team that created one of the first emojis used solely for communication, a heart-shaped pictogram that appeared on an NTT DoCoMo pager aimed at teenagers. It went on to become the Red Heart emoji.
Blob emoji is an implementation of emojis by Google featured in its Android mobile operating system between 2013 and 2017.
iOS 12 is the twelfth major release of the iOS mobile operating system developed by Apple. Aesthetically similar to its predecessor, iOS 11, it focuses more on performance than on new features, quality improvements and security updates. Announced at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference on June 4, 2018, iOS 12 was released to the public on September 17, 2018. It was succeeded for the iPhone and iPod Touch by iOS 13 on September 19, 2019, and for the iPad by iPadOS 13 on September 24, 2019. Security updates for iOS 12 continued for four years after the releases of iOS 13 and iPadOS 13 for devices unable to run the newer versions. The last update, 12.5.7, was released on January 23, 2023.
Che vuoi?, alternatively described as ma che vuoi?, ma che dici?/ma che stai dicendo?, or simply che? ("what?"), is one of the best known hand gestures of Italy. In English, it is sometimes referred to as "pinched fingers" or "finger purse". It is meant to express disbelief at what the other person is saying or doing, and/or to ridicule their opinions.
The Peach emoji (🍑) is a fruit emoji depicting a pinkish-orange peach. The emoji is noted for its resemblance to human buttocks or the vulva, owing to the center crease, and is consequently frequently used as a euphemism for such on social media. Often paired with the eggplant emoji (🍆), the peach more often represents female.
The implementation of emojis on different platforms took place across a three-decade period, starting in the 1990s. Today, the exact appearance of emoji is not prescribed but can vary between fonts and platforms, much like different typefaces.
The Pistol emoji (🔫) is an emoji usually displayed as a green or orange toy gun or water gun, but historically was displayed as an actual handgun on most older systems. In 2016, Apple replaced its realistic revolver design with a water gun emoji, resulting in other companies similarly changing their renditions over the following years.