Show Your Emotion

The history of emojis

Ofek Hagag, Published on June, 2019 in the לימוד אנגלית לתלמידים בבית הספר היסודי

I got my first cell-phone a long time ago. It was a big Nokia with a green screen and a lot of buttons, and the only game I could play on it was Snake. It was nothing like today’s smartphones. Texting was a lot like it is today. The only big difference was emojis. If we wanted to show emotion with an emoji, we had to make it. We used :) for a smiley face, we used :( for a sad face, and we even used B) for a cool face with sunglasses. This kind of emoji is called an emoticon. We did our best to be creative but it was nothing like all the emojis we have today. Now every smartphone has hundreds of little pictures to use and we can show many kinds of emotions.

Emoji Day is happening on July 17^th. It was founded in 2014 by Jeremy Berg — the man who started Emojipedia — the emoji encyclopedia. So, how did everything begin? The first picture emojis (emojis that were not emoticons) started in 1995 in Japan. Teenagers in Japan had special little beepers they could use to send each other messages. Those beepers had a set of emojis the teenagers could send each other. The word emoji is also Japanese (it means, “picture + character.)”

A full set of 176 emojis came out in 1999 by Japanese cell-phone companies. This is when older people started using emojis too. With time and technology, emojis became more sophisticated and people everywhere started using them. Technically, emojis are not words, but they are a part of our everyday language.

Dictionary מילון قاموس

• Screen , , מסך
• Buttons, , כפתורים
• Difference , , הבדל
• Emotion , , רגש
• Sunglasses, , משקפי שמש
• Creative , , יצירתיים
• Hundreds, , מאות
• Founded , , נוסד
• Beepers , , איתוריות
• Means, , משמעותה
• Character, , דמות
• Companies, , חברות
• Sophisticated , , מתוחכמים
• Language, , שפה