The History of Emoticons
A message without Emoticons can feel cold, expressionless, and impersonaland, let’s face it: We sometimes have a hard time recognizing the emotions of our interlocutor without these little emotional icons. Words can be misleading and we don’t always know how to use them. That’s why we use these expressive images in almost all of our conversations. And this, whether in a personal or professional context. Today, we’re going to tell you the story of Emoticons.
A 60-year-old concept!
The smiley face is the first facial expression simulation that has emerged. It was invented by Harvey Ball in 1963. As the name suggests, this symbol depicts a smiling face. To draw it, you had to use the characters “:” and “)”. But be careful, today’s little yellow faces didn’t exist at the time. The characters remained as they were and you had to tilt your head to see the face. This concept quickly became a success.
From “Smileys” to “Emoticons”
Emoticons appeared in the 80s. The name comes from the combination of “Emotions” and “Icons”. It was always a succession of special characters, numbers and letters. However, symbols have been added to express more emotions. Here are a few examples:
- : ( expressed sadness
- < 3 represented a heart
- ; ) illustrated a wink
For the record, Emoticons were born out of a joke gone wrong. A joke posted on the Carnegie Mellon bulletin board caused panic at the university in 1982. A campus computer scientist suggested inserting a smiley face at the end of all jokes. Also, serious messages had to be marked by other suitable symbols. Its purpose is to prevent another incident from occurring. This is how the first “Emoticons” appeared.
What about Emojis?
Emojis were created in 1999 by NTT DOCOMO. The Japanese telephone operator hired a designer to create these code points. Unlike Emoticons, these are real images. The ones we use today! This may include:
- A character that illustrates a profession or activity: 👨🍳
- An animal : 🐶
- Food : 🍔
- A means of transportation: 🚐
- Equipment of all kinds: 🥽
- Signage : 🔞 and many more
Emoticons have also become emojis. These are the little yellow faces that we know so well: 😊, 😉 or 🙁.
Conclusion
The real rise of emojis began in 2010. In fact, several emojis have been introduced into the UNICODE STANDARD this year. This allows us to use them on different media, platforms and software. At Cocoapp, we encourage you to use Emoticons when interacting with your customers. It’s a great way to quickly communicate emotions that words can’t describe. But also to give life to your texts to make them more attractive. We would like to remind you that we offer an efficient and easy-to-use messaging platform. Contact us for more information.
