ExchangeEveryDay Past Issues

Living within limits often inspires innovation. In the case of emojis—those colorful icons you see in texts and online—you can thank the 250-character limit of a late 1990s mobile phone-based email system for the 3600+ emojis in use today.

Adding brevity—and soon after color—to digital communications, they caught on quickly. "They aren’t tied to any language. They aren’t tied to any region of the world. They’re a global phenomenon," says Jennifer Daniel, chair of the emoji subcommittee at the Unicode Consortium.

Daniel notes anyone can propose a new emoji, and if they make a strong enough case, Unicode will accept it, though it may take up to two years to create and release it. Among the criteria for a new emoji: its distinctness, whether it can be used with existing emoji and whether it can have multiple meanings.

"We do get proposals in lots of different languages from around the world," says Daniel.

Did you know…

• In Japanese, emoji is a compound.
• The butterfly is the most popular animal emoji.
• The least popular category of emoji is flags.
• Once an emoji is encoded, it cannot be undone. It’s in the keyboard forever!