Ten things you never knew about… emojis

1. The word emoji comes from the Japanese “e” (picture) and “moji” (character).

2. The word has been used in Japanese since 1928 but according to the Oxford Dictionary was first seen in English in 1997.

3. Since 1988 however we had used the word emoticon to refer to representations of facial expressions formed from text and punctuation.

4. The word emoji has appeared in Oxford Dictionaries since 2013.

5. In 2015 Oxford Dictionaries named the Face with Tears of Joy emoji as their Word of the Year.

6. The most popular emoji is currently the Face With Tears of Joy to express laughter.

7. The Unicode Standard includes 2,823 emojis. Half of all comments on Instagram include emojis.

8. From 2016 to 2017 the use of emoji in marketing messages increased almost ninefold.

9. In 2009 a project began to translate the whole of Moby Dick into emoji. Emoji Dick, as it is called, gained a Library of Congress place in 2014.

10. The original emoji collection created in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita is in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, New York.