Despite its resemblance to the English words “emotion” and “emoticon” (which resemble early forms of emojis), the word “emoji” did not originate from either of those words. It actually is based on the Japanese words e and moji, which translate to “picture” and “character”, respectively. Its resemblance to the aforementioned English words is just an odd coincidence. Truly one of the most interesting emoji facts to remember
For many parts of the world, the Thumbs Up Sign emoji or Thumbs Up emoji 👍 is a normal emoji which means affirmation or approval. However, in the Middle East, Australia, and Greece, this gesture is a form of profanity. For these cultures, the emoji translates roughly to “Up yours!”
The peach emoji 🍑 had its debut in 2010 when Unicode first adopted emojis. This emoji is one of the more controversial emojis because of their perceived meanings. Only about 7% of people who use this are referring to the actual peach fruit. The vast majority, however, use it for non-fruit meanings, such as buttocks due to the fruit’s resemblance to human bottoms
In North America, emoji users almost exclusively associate this emoji with sexual connotations due to its resemblance to a penis. Because the eggplant emoji usually means something of sexual nature, Instagram banned the use and search of the hashtag #🍆 back in 2015
Another one of the more controversial emoji facts is that the pistol emoji 🔫 used to depict a real gun instead of a water gun. The emoji first appeared in 2010 and had the appearance of a classic revolver. Apple changed the pistol emoji from a classic revolver to a water gun in 2016. They redesigned it due to rising issues regarding gun violence. Other companies followed suit two years after this, and toy guns are now the standard form of the pistol emoji. Additionally, Apple and Microsoft also fought against the introduction of a proposed rifle emoji in 2016.
Aside from the diversity of emojis through different skin tones, Apple also released gender-neutral emojis in 2019. These emojis display ambiguous individuals with no specified gender. One of these emojis is the Person Facepalming emoji 🤦 or simply the Facepalm emoji 🤦, which may either appear as a boy or a girl on different platforms. Apple made three variable options when it comes to depicting the person: a boy, a girl, and a gender-neutral person.
The British company Swiftkey made a study in 2015 regarding the use of emojis globally, garnering data from speakers of 16 languages. They found that Canadians used the Pile of Poo emoji 💩 more than any other country. Australians, on the other hand, used more alcohol-related emojis such as the Beer Mug emoji 🍺..
People can be quite creative when it comes to emojis. One of the most intriguing emoji facts is that there’s a programming language that supports emojis. The programming language Emojicode started off as a Github project and allows programmers to write and run programs using emojis. Although the language does contain normal text, most types and functionalities of the programming language run on emojis.