World Emoji Day

Look closely at the calendar emoji on an iPhone — 📅 — and you will find it permanently set to 17 July. That is not a default that means nothing. When Apple’s designers drew the icon, they froze it on the date the company first unveiled its iCal calendar application, at the Macworld Expo in 2002. For years it sat there as a private joke buried in a pictogram most people never examined. Then in 2014 Jeremy Burge, the founder of the reference site Emojipedia, noticed it, decided the date hidden in the calendar emoji ought to be the day we celebrate all emoji, and invented World Emoji Day on the spot. It is a holiday whose date is written, quite literally, on the thing it honours.

The Apple Easter egg behind the date

The chain of accidents is worth tracing, because it is unusually neat. Apple announced iCal on 17 July 2002. When emoji later needed a calendar symbol, Apple’s artwork showed a tear-off page reading “JUL 17” — a small homage to that launch. Other platforms drew their own calendar emoji showing other dates, so the 17 July connection is specifically an Apple one, but it was Apple’s version that Burge spotted and seized upon. The date, in other words, commemorates neither the birth of emoji nor any milestone in their history; it commemorates a designer’s in-joke about a piece of Mac software. Few holidays have a more delightfully arbitrary origin, and the arbitrariness rather suits the subject.

A founder and a reference book

Jeremy Burge launched Emojipedia in 2013 as a searchable catalogue of every emoji and how each one looked across different platforms, and founded World Emoji Day the following year, on 17 July 2014. What started as one enthusiast’s idea was adopted with startling speed by technology firms, brands and the press, until a date invented to amuse became an annual fixture. Burge later joined the Unicode Consortium’s emoji subcommittee, putting the day’s creator close to the very process that decides which new symbols the world gets — a fitting promotion for someone who turned emoji-watching into a profession.

A brief history of the symbols

The pictograms long predate the day that honours them. In 1999 the interface designer Shigetaka Kurita, working for the Japanese mobile operator NTT DoCoMo, drew a set of 176 tiny images on a grid of twelve by twelve pixels for the company’s i-mode internet service. Drawing on manga conventions and on existing pictographic shorthand, Kurita built symbols for weather, traffic, food and feeling — a visual vocabulary for the cramped screens of early mobile phones. That original 176-emoji set is now held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, an unusual honour for work made for a phone network.

The word itself is Japanese: e meaning picture, moji meaning character. Its resemblance to the English “emotion” is pure coincidence, however convenient. Emoji escaped Japan once they were folded into the Unicode standard around 2010, which let a symbol composed on one manufacturer’s device be understood on another’s — and after that the catalogue grew into the thousands, accumulating foods, flags, animals, professions and an ever-broadening range of skin tones and family configurations.

How standardisation actually works

The colourful chaos rests on careful bureaucracy. The Unicode Consortium assigns each emoji a code point — a number — but crucially does not dictate how it should be drawn. That is why a single emoji can wear noticeably different faces on an Apple device, a Google one and a Samsung one, and why a message can occasionally land askew when the sender’s grinning symbol arrives looking pained on the recipient’s screen. Anyone may submit a proposal for a new emoji, but it must argue its case — expected frequency of use, distinctiveness, breadth of meaning — before the subcommittee, and most submissions are rejected. The system that looks so frivolous on a phone keyboard is governed with the seriousness of any other piece of international text encoding.

Why a pictogram earned a day

Emoji answered a genuine deficiency in written communication. Stripped of tone of voice, facial expression and gesture, plain text is a famously poor carrier of irony, warmth and intent — and a single well-placed symbol can restore a great deal of what writing throws away. A trailing wink softens an insult into a joke; a face with tears of joy converts a flat sentence into laughter. That expressive power is not trivial: it has reshaped how a generation conducts the small business of daily relationships, and it is why a set of cartoon faces could plausibly be argued to belong in a dictionary. The same impulse to play with language for the sheer pleasure of it animates lighter observances such as International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and the workplace whimsy of Fun at Work Day.

How it is marked

World Emoji Day has grown into a busy occasion on social media, where technology companies time announcements of new symbols to coincide with it, brands run playful campaigns, and users share their favourites and argue over what a given face is meant to convey. The Emojipedia World Emoji Awards, a tongue-in-cheek ceremony, name the year’s most anticipated and most popular emoji. For most people the celebration is delightfully simple — a licence to lard one’s messages with a few extra colourful characters and to enjoy the small creativity the symbols invite. It shares that easy, sociable spirit with friendship-centred dates like National Best Friends Day, being above all an excuse to connect with a bit of warmth.

Misunderstandings, lawsuits and shifting meanings

For symbols designed to clarify, emoji generate a remarkable amount of confusion, and that confusion is part of what makes the day interesting rather than merely cute. Because Unicode dictates the meaning but not the picture, the same code point can be drawn so differently across platforms that the intended message is lost: a “grimacing face” rendered as a pained wince on one phone and a cheerful grin on another caused enough cross-platform misreadings that researchers at the University of Minnesota studied the phenomenon in 2016, finding that people frequently disagreed about whether a given emoji was positive or negative even before any platform differences entered the picture.

Meanings also drift and bend. Emoji that began as innocent depictions of fruit or vegetables have acquired second, unprintable lives, and courts have increasingly had to rule on what a string of emoji actually meant — a judge in Israel found in 2017 that a hopeful sequence of emoji had created the impression of a binding agreement to rent a flat. The same designed-by-committee process that keeps emoji broadly compatible cannot govern what people decide they mean, and that gap between official definition and lived usage is a recurring theme of the commentary the day attracts.

A new layer of written language

It is tempting to dismiss emoji as decoration, but they fill a role older writing systems left vacant. Spoken language carries tone, pitch, pace and a face full of expression; written language throws nearly all of that away, which is why sarcasm so often misfires in text and a curt message reads as anger when none was meant. Emoji restore a fraction of that lost bandwidth — a single symbol marking a sentence as a joke, a softening, an affection — and they do it in a way that crosses some language barriers, since a picture of a birthday cake needs no translation. They are not a replacement for words but a layer laid over them, the closest thing the written word has yet acquired to a tone of voice.

Fun facts

• The 17 July on the calendar emoji marks the day Apple announced its iCal software at Macworld in 2002 — a private in-joke that became a global holiday only when Jeremy Burge noticed it in 2014.
• Shigetaka Kurita’s original 1999 set of 176 emoji, drawn on a 12-by-12 pixel grid for NTT DoCoMo, is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
• In 2015 Oxford Dictionaries named the “face with tears of joy” emoji its Word of the Year — the first time a pictograph rather than a word had won.
• Unicode assigns each emoji a number but never the artwork, which is why the same symbol can look cheerful on one phone and alarmed on another — the source of countless good-natured arguments.

A closing reflection

There is something fitting in a holiday whose origin is an accident inside an accident — a date hidden in an icon designed to commemorate a piece of calendar software, spotted by chance and elevated by enthusiasm. Emoji themselves followed much the same path: a stopgap for tiny Japanese phone screens that quietly became a layer of grammar laid over half the world’s writing. We tend to assume that the things we use every day arrived by design. More often, like the little symbols and the day that honours them, they were improvised, noticed, and simply never put down again.