World Emoji Day 2025: How emojis evolved from Japanese pictographs to a global language

In today’s digital world, where words are not always enough, emojis have become a universal way to express feelings. As people around the world celebrate World Emoji Day on July 17, attention turns to how these tiny symbols have changed the way we communicate on phones and social media.

World Emoji Day was first celebrated in 2014. It was started by Jeremy Burge, the founder of Emojipedia, a website that explains what emojis mean. July 17 was chosen because that’s the date shown on the calendar emoji, making it the perfect day to celebrate emojis.

A Japanese idea that went global

Emojis were first created in Japan in the late 1990s. A man named Shigetaka Kurita, working for a mobile company called NTT DoCoMo, designed a set of 176 very simple pictures. These tiny 12-by-12 pixel icons helped people show emotions in text messages. That small idea grew into a global trend.

Cultural impact and modern use

Perhaps the turning point came in 2010 when the Unicode Consortium standardised emojis, enabling them to operate consistently across platforms and devices. It was then adopted by Apple for its iOS platform in 2011, and in 2013 for Google's Android system. Since then, emojis have grown from simple smileys to an elaborate symbol set representing a culture, gender, profession, and more.

For the last ten years, emojis have increasingly acquired cultural relevance. Unicode releases have introduced features such as skin tone modifiers, gender-neutral representations, and icons representing disabilities and differing relationships. The later additions have been inclusive, signaling that global identity is now a key player in letting digital language reflect real-world diversity.

By 2025, however, emojis are very much more than simply decorating text. They find wide application in marketing campaigns, workplace conversations, and political messaging. Emoji currency on social gives them the funny, sarcastic, emotional, or trending edge, supervised by sites X, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

As World Emoji Day 2025 is celebrated across the globe, it offers a moment to reflect on how far digital expression has come and how something as small as a symbol can speak volumes.