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2021, the eighth annual World Emoji Day is coming👏!! July 17 is an important day for every emoji-lovers, it is an annual unofficial holiday to celebrate emoji. As one of the emoji fans, of course we need to do something in this special day!
As we know emoji has become the most common element in social network culture, it also has become an international language and deeply loved by users. Under this social phenomenon, people have begun to extend the usage of emoji to get more fun, even began to study emoji. This subverting most people's traditional cognition of emoji.
🔺：One of the most popular emoji game(?) in tiktok: Emoji Redesign
So, let's me show you the origin of World Emoji Day, and some interesting information about Emoji.
The origin of World Emoji Day
Since NTT engineer Kurita Shigetaka designed about 200 emoji images for the release of the Japanese mobile phone operator NTT DoCoMo's integrated mobile internet service "i-mode", emoji has started its global phenomenon. With the development of coding technology, emoji can be sent to different devices of various platforms. At this point, some emoji-lovers come up with a thought: We need to have a day to celebrate emoji!
In order to make emoji widely used, hopefully make people feel the fun of emoji, in 2014, Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge created this interesting holiday. At the first, he planned to use November 21, the date Apple introduced emoji to their iPhone, as the date of World Emoji Day. However, on the one hand, November 21 is a little bit late in a year, on the other hand, at that time, emoji support was somewhat limited, even hidden on non-Apple devices, Jeremy Burge thinks maybe the date shows in iPhone calendar emoji is the most obvious and most appropriate date for World Emoji Day.
As for the reason why July 17, the date was inspired by the calendar emoji shows on iPhone. July 17, it's also the date iCal premiered at the MacWorld conference in 2002.
And now "World Emoji Day finds its place on a packed calendar of holidays", reported by CNBC, an American pay television business.
The Calendar Emoji 📅
Speaking of the emoji [Calendar📅], it belongs to one of the earliest set of emoji, which submitted by 3 Japanese carrier in 2010 (KDDI, NTT Docomo and Softbank). When World Emoji Day spreads to the world, in 2016, Google changed the appearance of its calendar emoji to display 17 July on its products, such as Android, Gmail, Hangouts, and Chrome OS. and nowadays, most of major platforms had switched to show July 17 on their calendar emoji, to avoid confusion on World Emoji Day.
There is a funny episode of calendar emoji in Twitter's twemoji. The original design of Twemoji's calendar showed the date of July 15 (Twitter's launch date), then it was changed to March 21, the founding date of Twitter company. And on July 13, 2020, Twemoji updated its calendar emoji and shows July 17 now. This kind of act can show the impact that World Emoji Day brought to the world.
However, there are some vendors have not use July 17 in their calendar emoji, but the date they display is also has meaning to them. For example, Facebook calendar emoji shows May 14th, it is the date of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's birthday🎂. WhatsApp shows February 24, 2009, it is the earliest registration time for WhatsApp. As for those platforms which displays [12] in their calendar, it is said to indicate that there are twelve months in one year.
Events and News about World Emoji Day
Since World Emoji Day was established, many Emoji-related events have been held in this day every year. And some companies use this day to launch emoji-related promotions.
- July 17, 2015, World Emoji Day became a hot topic on Twitter. Same year, Pepsi released an emoji keyboard called PepsiMoji, and made custom emoji Pepsi cans and bottles. (so cute!)
- 2016, Pepsi hosted a special party to celebrate the opening of the pop-up interactive exhibit that was timed to World Emoji Day.
- 2017, to celebrate the upcoming "The Emoji Movie", Saks Fifth Avenue launched a limited-edition products and emotive window at its flagship store.
- 2018, a musical called "Emojiland" premiered off-broadway in New York City at The Acorn Theatre on World Emoji Day.
- 2019, the British Library hosted an event on World Emoji Day, and the National Museum of Cinema in Turin also hosted the exhibition
#FacceEmozioni 1500–2020: From Physiognomy to Emojison this day. - 2020, people can't gather around due to COVID-19, so many people spontaneously held many Emoji-related events on social media under hashtag #WorldEmojiDay.
Same year, in order to celebrate World Emoji Day, Google released a series of new emoji that to represent women in several background and work.
The Empire State Building lighted up “emoji yellow” for World Emoji Day this year.
🖼️: Twitter @WorldEmojiDay
What's more, A Guinness World Record was attempted in Dubai on World Emoji Day in 2017 for the "largest gathering of people dressed as emojis." (Cool! I wish I was there too🥺)
🖼️: Photo by Jeremy Daniel
At the same time, we also have a section of unofficial annual awards about emoji, to show the most used 10 emojis in this year. The best 10 emoji in 2019 and 2020 are these emojis.
And in 2021, there are something change of this ranking:
It is kind of surprised that the “king” of emoji [😂] has lost its crown, and a new king [🤍] is rising. The number of finalists for heart emoji increased this year, this can be said that hearts win the team championship this year. Among all the heart emojis, [❤️🔥] is a new emoji released in Emoji 13.1, 2021. As a new member of emoji family, I'm really surprised that it can occupies a position of this leaderboard. (This is somehow like Game of Thrones👑.)
Emoji Information in recent years
It is precisely because of people’s love of emoji and use emoji a lot on the Internet, there are more and more ways to spread emoji and rich its usages. Even emoji has its own anime movie and documentary!
🔺: Picture Character: An Emoji Documentary(left) & The Emoji Movie (right)
Some celebrities make their own emoji characters, such as Kim Kardashian's emoji App [Kimoji app], ZAYN emoji app [ZAYNmoji] created by ZAYN;
Marvel designed 128 emoji of their characters in a poster for their 10th Anniversary
At the same time, there are some popular emoji challenges in twitter and tiktok like [Emoji Face Challenge], [Emoji Makeup Challenge], [Emoji Outfit Challenge]……
💡: Imagination really runs wild!
However, it is not enough! People even began to study emoji in many different angles. As a "global" language, emoji has been studied by some scholars from the perspective of linguistics. But some people think that emoji should be analyzed from a psychological aspect of the emotions it contains, which is emoji sentiment analysis, a project we are keep working on right now. Read more about Emoji Sentiment Analysis:《🔍We Launched Sentiment Analysis Of Emoji!》
After this technology matures, it is no doubt Emoji Sentiment Analysis can be used in marketing, advertising, psychology, medical and other fields to analyze people's emotions.
Summary
Though World Emoji Day is not an official festival, it is still love by people all over the world. Maybe you can have an emoji-only conversation with your friends, do some emoji games🎮, solve some emoji puzzles🧩, make some emoji art👨🎨, wear your favorite emoji T-shirt👕…
🔺：Follow us in Twitter and Youtube @EmojiAll🤗
There are many ways to celebrate World Emoji Day. We hope emoji can be more worldwide and more people can understand the fun of emoji. We wish you Happy World Emoji Day🥳!
💬Comment : Current Language
