Our journal topic tonight was emoji, and both girls just described their favorites. I’ll tell you mine, but first a word on emoji more broadly. They started off in the late 1990s, used by a Japanese communications company, NTT DoCoMo, to differentiate its i-mode mobile internet service. As mobile phones have grown along with international multi-lingual texting, they became universal. The name itself comes from Japanese:

絵 (e ≅ picture) 文 (mo ≅ writing) 字 (ji ≅ character)

Emoji are currently “managed” by Unicode, a standards organization that defines character encoding on modern computer systems. Before emoji, it was pretty obscure (even for a global standards body). Since emoji, its work has become widely known and appreciated even if the organization itself has stayed pretty low-key.

Emoji are defined in general terms with a description and a rough line drawing. Each platform then implements its own interpretation of them. For a complete list of all current emoji, and their different implementations across Apple, Google, Facebook, and other products, see the latest full emoji list from Unicode. For example, here’s the first row in the food-vegetable category which shows the various images associated with the avocado emoji:

Every year or so, Unicode releases a new set of emoji. Here’s a list of all emoji broken down the year they were added. 2015 brought the burrito and pink unicorn which became instant classics in our household. And, to finish the emoji theme Claire and Juliet started, 2016 brought my current personal favorite: