Emoji Timeline

A timeline of cultural and technical events in the history of emoji

Twitter Sets Poop Emoji as Autoreply

Twitter CEO Elon Musk announces via tweet that messages to the company’s press email (press@twitter.com), which have gone unanswered for months, would now receive a “💩” (poop emoji) in an automatic reply. When Musk took over the social media platform in late October 2022, following a $44 billion deal, Twitter’s press team effectively stopped replying … Continued

YouTube Emotes

YouTube does a Twitch and starts offering support for what they call “YouTube Emotes”. Similar to YouTube’s emoji support, Emotes can be found in a scrolling menu and used within the comment section of a video or when active in a live stream. To find and use YouTube Emotes, users can click the smiling face … Continued

PJ the Corgi

In February Queen Elizabeth became the first British monarch to celebrate a Platinum Jubilee, marking 70 years on the throne. One week ahead of the celebrations to begin in earnest in June the Royal Family announces a special Jubilee “emoji” featuring a crown-wearing corgi called PJ. Corgis have been synonymous with the Queen, 96. During … Continued

DEA’s Emoji Drug Code

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in the US publishes multiple versions of an Emoji Drug Code fact sheet. “Emojis were originally designed to represent an emotion, event, or activity, but have recently taken on a language of their own. Criminal organizations, including drug traffickers, have noticed and are using emojis to buy and sell counterfeit … Continued

Emoji to Scale

Inspired by a Twitter joke where the Rooster emoji is seen tower over the  Automobile emoji, Javier Bórquez creates a website that allows you to scroll through a variety of different emojis on a more-or-less scientifically-accurate scale, from Mosquito to the Sun. “Seeing that the chicken emoji is bigger than the car always made me chuckle, so for fun, I made a … Continued

Wordle Players Use Emojis to Share Their Results

Josh Wardle, a Welsh software engineer, creates a web-based guessing game during the pandemic for his partner Palak Shah, who loves word games. As a play on his last name, he names it Wordle. In the game, the player has six attempts to guess a five-letter word, with feedback given for each guess in the form … Continued

English Racists Abuses Monkey Emoji

After England’s football team loses the final of the European Championships, the football players Bukayo Saka, Jadon Sancho and Marcus Rashford was subjected to racist abuse online after their penalty shots were saved by the Italian goal keeper. Within minutes racists flooded Saka’s Instagram account with monkey emojis. “There is a long history of Black … Continued

Making Maps out of Emojis

Matt Dzugan, Director of Data Science at Chicago Startup project44, releases “Making Maps out of Emojis“: “A mesmerizing emoji-based visualization of our planet, with a huge variety of different customization options and a detailed explanation of how the tool was created. This is best initially viewed on platforms other than Microsoft computers so you can … Continued

Emoji Resear.ch

In March 2021 I launch the website Emoji Resear.ch. As more and more research is made about emojis I felt that there was a need for a place where all this could be easily found. The website collects information and links to emoji research and put it in one place that could easily be searched. … Continued