What does a typical day in your role look like?
It is very varied. I have a foot in two worlds, reflected by my dual job titles. The public-facing one is the editor-in-chief, and the internal one is the product manager. With the editor-in-chief role, it’s making sure all of our content across Emojipedia is accurate, which involves a lot of auditing of emoji-use case definitions, and ensuring all of our various pages describing things like the emoji release cycle are up to date.
I also do a lot of social listening on platforms like X (formerly known as Twitter), Threads, and Instagram, to see if there are any newly emergent emoji trends, which we also get a very strong indication of via our viral page views. If something is going viral on one particular social platform, we tend to see it begin to be impacted in terms of our own emoji pedia page views as people are checking what it means.
We document and write up all these emoji and emoji-adjacent updates. Things like when Apple changed the gun emoji design in 2016 to a water pistol, or when people had a lot of fun with how Google’s burger emoji had the cheese at the bottom and started mocking that to the point where Google released an update and put the cheese higher.
When was the word emoji first used?
Our emoji design archive dates back to 1982, but there is discussion about whether or not anything before 1997 can be considered an emoji. I’m currently working on a write-up because when the term was first coined is a bit of a grey area. It’s a Japanese term, and comes from the Japanese for picture (絵: e, pronounced eh), plus character (文字, pronounced mōji). The fact emoji and emoticons are similar terms is a complete coincidence. The term emoji has literally nothing to do with emotion.
There are a lot of pre-1997 mobile phone platforms that had emoji-like designs. The short answer is that they are more like proto-emoji, but they deserve to be displayed on Emojipedia because they are fascinating precursors.
How are new emojis chosen?
We use the term ‘emoji’ to refer to a code point or series of code points recommended by an international body called Unicode. Unicode manages an international standardisation series of documents called the ‘Unicode Standard’, which all of our digital devices should adhere to if you want to ensure fluid communication of text objects between each other. Emojis have been part of that since 2010.
Every year, Unicode has a subcommittee on which members of Google, Apple, Meta etc sit. Usually, between April and July, they open up a selection process where anybody can propose an emoji. Proposals are then considered by the subcommittee before potentially making the draft emoji list. The current draft list has a smiley face with bags under its eyes — like me — a harp, which I know people here in Dublin will be very excited about because of the cultural association between the Irish and the harp and Guinness and the harp. There is also a shovel, a fingerprint, a paint splatter, and the flag for the region Sark will be included.
Keith Broni, talking about emoji on BBC Breakfast / Credit: BBC
This draft list is reviewed by the other members of Unicode, which ultimately decides whether the emojis should be included in the latest version of the Unicode standard, expected to be ratified in September. Once September hits, it is down to each of the platforms which support emojis to add them to its font.
Does an emoji replace a full stop?
Emojis tend to be used as punctuation, so they would take the place of the full stop. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but if you actually look at how people do use them, they would not be using full stops. You can see an exclamation followed by an emoji, but that’s basically just a combination of semantic markers, where the full stop is not adding any additional emphasis, per se. The emoji seems to do the heavy lifting there. So it’s not a it’s not a hard and fast rule. But you would tend to see people use them as punctuation.
Is the word emoji singular or plural?
Technically speaking, the word emoji is both singular and plural. Derived from the Japanese, they would use the term emoji — picture character — in both singular and plural contexts. But the word has been grandfathered into the English language and other languages. I use emojis for simplicity when I’m talking about plural.
So from a very strict perspective, you should say emoji for the plural as well as the singular. It only becomes important if you’re following a particular style guide that says this.
What are you most proud of in your career so far?
I feel incredibly fortunate and humbled to have ended up in the space I work in. Running Emojipedia is an incredible privilege. It is a resource that is used by millions and millions of people every single month, and people come to us for a variety of different reasons. I am so thankful to Jeremy for taking me under his wing and allowing me to dive into the space of emoji data analysis.
The emoji data analysis work that I was doing over the years leading up to becoming editor-in-chief was my favourite kind of stuff, and I wish I could do more of it now. Some things are very obvious, but when you see the data telling the story, it’s so powerful. Like seeing how nobody uses the Jack-o’-lantern pumpkin emoji outside of October. But when it comes to October, you just see this boom, like seeing how the turkey emoji spikes massively during November for Thanksgiving. Mapping those seasonal variations has been something I’ve been incredibly proud to add to Emojipedia’s reporting.
