The story of text-based emotion marks begins on September 19, 1982, when Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott Fahlman proposed using simple symbols to signal humor on early bulletin boards. Those boards were the hometown for concert notices, information requests, and everyday messages. People sometimes missed irony in a joking post, which prompted the idea that a tiny symbol sequence could clearly show when something was not meant seriously.
Fahlman explained that a lightweight system would be easy for ASCII terminals to handle and would provide a clean way to flag jokes. The idea spread quickly to other universities where the early Internet formed. By the 1990s, such symbols began appearing in online chats as conversations shifted from in-person to digital. Back then, long-distance communication relied on phones, and text messages felt limited for conveying tone. Small symbols helped express sarcasm, surprise, and more, with familiar examples like the winking face and other playful cues.
These signs persisted, especially among generations who saw the transition from landlines to instant messaging. Emoji pictograms emerged as a compact visual language in 1999 when Japanese designer Shigetaka Kurita created a core set of 176 images. The initial collection did not yet include the then common thumbs up or many laughing faces, but it featured hearts, animals, moon phases, a bomb, and a broken heart. The project originated with the Japanese mobile provider DOCOMO and quickly inspired rival firms to adopt the idea, turning pictograms into a staple across Japan.
The trend stayed regional until the late 2000s, when engineers from Google and Apple proposed expanding Unicode with hundreds of new emoji. The proposal gained approval, and by 2010 emoji joined letters and other symbols in Unicode, appearing on on-screen keyboards across iOS and Android devices.
Alongside this growth, discussions about representation and symbolism intensified. Critics asked why there are multiple symbols for sushi but not for burritos or salad dressing, why many professional icons skew male, why emoji colors often appear yellow despite diverse real skin tones, and why some flags are present while others are not. Over time, developers addressed many concerns. Platforms such as Telegram began offering broader choices for food items, gender representation, and skin tones to better reflect user identities.
Ancient script and the origins of emoji
From a historical standpoint, Kurita did not invent something entirely new. Human communication began with ideograms, signs that convey a concrete idea, object, or concept. Ideograms differ from hieroglyphs in that they can represent sounds or ideas rather than being tied to a single image alone. In some writing systems, hieroglyphs express sounds as part of a broader script, while ideograms convey ideas directly.
Ideograms should not be confused with pictograms, which visually depict an object. When emoji are read as pictograms, a symbol for a plane cannot reliably mean travel, and a face with glasses cannot alone signify boredom or cleverness. The ancestors of emoji go back to ancient writings where ideographic signs appeared in early scripts such as cuneiform and, in some cases, retain recognizable meanings for modern readers. For example, certain symbols could still be understood today as representing sun, house, cane, or mountain ideas.
Exhibits in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem illustrate how modern emoji align with ancient symbol sets. A mountain might imply a foreign country in some contexts. Similar ideographic patterns in ancient scripts resemble some emoji forms, suggesting ideas such as head, fish, arrow, or star.
Simplified smiles across time
Even though Fahlman is widely credited as the father of text emoticons, emoji-like characters have a long lineage. A schematic smile sign appeared on a 3,700-year-old sherbet jug found near the Hittite city of Carchemish in what is now Turkey. The exact purpose of the drawing remains a mystery, but the smiling motif has endured for millennia.
Fahlman’s idea found echoes in other eras as well. In one historical note, a simple satisfied-face diagram was reportedly used to sign off on documents in rival centuries. In another scenario, a famous writer imagined a curved line trailing behind a bracket as a perfect sign to convey a smile, underscoring the longstanding fascination with typographic emotion marks.
Scholarly discussions on these topics appear across humanities and technology histories, highlighting how emoji and emoticons evolved from practical communication needs and human imagination. Emphasis rests on how people have used signs to convey tone, intent, and emotion across different cultures and eras. The examination of this topic is widely documented in modern academic literature and technology histories, reflecting a shared interest in how visual signs shape everyday communication.