Emoji are widely credited to Shigetaka Kurita, who designed an early set of around 176 pictographs in 1998–99 for NTT DoCoMo's i-mode mobile internet platform in Japan, aiming to convey emotion and information more efficiently within short message limits.

In the years that followed, competing Japanese phone carriers developed their own incompatible emoji sets, meaning a symbol sent from one device could display completely differently, or not at all, on another.

From a Japanese Mobile Feature to a Global Standard

How New Emoji Get Approved Today

That fragmentation began to resolve once the Unicode Consortium, the organization responsible for standardizing text characters across computing systems, started incorporating emoji into the Unicode standard from around 2010 onward, allowing the same emoji to render consistently, if sometimes stylistically differently, across platforms.

Today, anyone can submit a proposal for a new emoji to the Unicode Consortium, where it is reviewed by an Emoji Subcommittee against criteria such as expected usage and existing gaps in the emoji set. Approved batches are typically released on a roughly annual cycle, though the exact schedule can shift from year to year.

Sources

  1. The Unicode Consortium
  2. Emojipedia

FAQ

Who invented emoji?

Shigetaka Kurita is widely credited with designing one of the earliest widely used emoji sets in 1998–99 for a Japanese mobile platform.

Who decides which new emoji get added?

The Unicode Consortium's Emoji Subcommittee reviews public proposals against set criteria before approving new emoji for release.

Is "emoji" the same as "emoticon"?

No, emoticons are built from standard text characters like ":)", while emoji are actual pictographic characters standardized within Unicode.

About the Author

We reference The Unicode Consortium, Emojipedia to explain the background and current understanding of this topic.

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