What Are Emojis and Why We Love Them

Unless you have been away from technology for the past 10+ years, you have likely seen and used an emoji. But what exactly are emojis? Where did they come from? Why do we love using them?

If these are questions you need answered, continue reading as we explore what emojis are, their origin, and why we use them on a daily basis in our digital lives.

What Are Emojis?

Emojis are symbols or icons that are used in the digital space and mainly represent emotions or moods. If you have used any social media platform or instant messaging service, you have undoubtedly seen and used them.

In addition to expressing an emotion or reaction, you can also use them to express a concept or an idea. Emojis can range from faces that depict happiness, sadness, or anger as well as objects like pizza, cars, or books.

The top 3 most used emojis in the world in 2023 include the “loudly crying face”, “rolling on the floor laughing”, and “tears of joy”.

What We Mostly Love About Emojis

Even though people use emojis for many different reasons, there are a few undeniable motivations for why we love using them. According to ExpressVPN, one of the main things we love about emojis is how they enhance emotional expression. For example, if you were to laugh in real life, you wouldn’t just say “haha”, your face would light up, and you would smile.

Emojis add a sense of playfulness to conversations; an instant messaging conversation would be very boring without emojis. People also love the visual engagement that emojis bring to the table, which helps to make conversations more dynamic.

Brief History of Emojis

So, where did emojis come from? The first ever emoji was created in 1997 by Shigetaka Kurita, a Japanese artist who worked for NTT Docomo, a mobile communication company. Shigetaka was helping to develop a new internet platform similar to Twitter, which used limited characters. His idea was to use pictures to replace words.

Naturally, this became very popular, and competing companies began including them too. This led to the creation of many emojis, such as Unicode adopting and creating hundreds of them. It was only in 2011, when Apple added an emoji keyboard to their iOS devices, that it took over the West.

Why We Use Them

Aside from breaking up large walls of text that can be boring to read through, emojis are used to enhance conversation and can easily explain the tone of a message. You can prevent many misunderstandings, and it’s a bonus that emojis make digital sarcasm so much easier. Emojis also have cultural significance. Different groups of people use the same emoji to represent different things.

We also use emojis to express non-verbal cues. For example, if someone sends you something funny, you can reply with a laughing face without needing to type “haha”. Similarly, if you are angry, you can send an angry emoji.