17 July is the one day of the year when the calendar
#emoji is correct!
The word emoji combines the Japanese e (絵, picture) + moji (文字, character) and dates back to the late 80s. Its similarity to the English "emotion" is just a coincidence.
Nowadays, emoji are standardised by the Unicode Consortium, a Californian non-profit that has its roots in facilitating a universal digital representation of the world's writing systems.
#Unicode doesn't specify exactly how emoji should look – so they're different on Android and Apple devices, for example – but it lists their names.
The first major character set used in computing was
#ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, published in 1963. Using 7 bits, it could represent 128 characters — more than enough for a to z, A to Z, 0 to 9 and common punctuation marks, but certainly indicative of a North American worldview.
Later "extended" versions of ASCII doubled this to 256 possibilities, allowing for dozens of accented letters, characters like æ and ß, and symbols like © and ¾. And double-byte character sets like Shift JIS meant that Chinese, Korean and Japanese could be represented in full. But multiple standards existed, and it became just a bit too common to see ����.
The answer was Unicode: a single, multi-byte character encoding standard for everyone. Plus emoji!
#language #i18n
