Who created the first emoji

Shigetaka Kurita, a Japanese interface designer, is credited with creating the first set of emojis in 1999. He was working for NTT DOCOMO, a Japanese cell phone company, and was part of a team tasked with developing the company's first mobile internet system. The system allowed for a limited number of characters, so Kurita came up with the idea to replace words with pictures. His set of 176 emojis contained simple 12-pixel by 12-pixel images that expressed a variety of emotions and ideas.

The word "emoji" comes from the Japanese words "e" (picture), "mo" (write), and "ji" (character). Emojis are different from emoticons, which are composed using regular characters. While emojis existed prior to the 1990s, they were often defined as pictograms in Asia. The term emoji is of Japanese origin, with the term only adopted in the west from 2010 onward.

Kurita's invention has had an enormous impact on communication. Today, more than 900 million emojis are sent on Facebook Messenger every day and half of Instagram comments contain emojis

How many emojis were in the first set

The first set of emojis was created in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita, a Japanese interface designer who worked on the development team for "i-mode," an early mobile internet platform. The set consisted of 176 emojis and was released by the Japanese mobile phone company NTT DOCOMO for mobile phones and pagers. The term "emoji" is of Japanese origin, with the term only adopted in the west from 2010 onwards. Emoji is a portmanteau of the Japanese words e, or "picture," and moji, or "character".

Kurita got inspiration from various sources to create the emoji set. He drew inspiration from Japanese manga where characters are often drawn with symbolic representations called manpu, as well as from weather pictograms, Chinese characters, and street signs. The emoji were designed on a simple twelve-by-twelve-pixel grid. Today, more than 3,000 emojis exist, including 117 new emojis that were introduced in 2020.