Thursday 13 for World Emoji Day

Colleen at The Thursday 13 holds a weekly blogging prompt where bloggers make a list of 13 things on Thursdays. The topic is for you to choose. The blog host doesn't have any official graphics to display on the Thursday 13 posts, so I decided to whip one up myself. 🙂    

  

Today is World Emoji Day. Here are some things about these icons that have become popular in text messages, emails, posts, etc. Just picking out 13 posts was hard (as always), so here are the links from which I obtained those I listed, so you can click to see more. Do a search to find out even more.

1. Before emojis, there were emoticons. Emoticons are combinations of characters, punctuation marks, letters and numbers that are arranged in order to create a facial expression, while emojis are icons representing emotions, objects, people, situations. 
2. World Emoji Day is celebrated on July 17th because the “calendar” emoji on Apple devices shows this exact date! 
3. The birthday cake and pizza emoji are the most common food emoji used year-round.
4. If you are referring to more than one emoji, the pluralization is emoji not emojis (though as you can see from some of the links, many do not see to know this).
5. In 2015, diverse skin tone options were made available for human emojis, making a big step towards inclusivity and representing a wider range of identities in emojis. (There are still a lot of talks when it comes to emoji diversity and the problem goes way beyond just race).
6. Emojis are more than 20 years old, having begin in 1999.
7. Only 7% of people use the peach emoji as a fruit.
8. Emoji keyboards were added to iOS by Apple in 2011 and in Androids in 2013. (I don't have a new Apple keyboard, BTW).
9. The Unicode Consortium approves all the new emojis that are added every year.
10. In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries' "Word of the Year" was the "Face with Tears of Joy" emoji. 
11. The first (extremely pixelated) emoji were created by Shigetaka Kurita in 1999 for cellphones and pagers. They are now housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
12. Dictionary.com was the first dictionary to add explanations to emojis in 2018, legitimizing even more the importance and influence emojis have as a linguistic tool.
13. Also in 2018, over 900 million emojis were sent daily without text on Facebook Messenger.