Emoji Quotient: 10 Little Known Facts About EMOJI

Do you have a high Emoji Quotient? If you can understand the 3 emoji sentences above, you are probably a fluent in this ‘geek speak’. What was once an alternative communication form is now the ‘it-speak’ amongst chatters via the various social platforms.

Whether you are a proficient emoji user or not, here are 10 trivial facts which we think you may not know about emoji!

1. It Is Not All About Your Emotions
Originally the word EMOJI means pictograph, it literally means “picture” (e) + “character” (moji) in Japanese

2. Secrets in Flowers
Some emoji are very specific to Japanese culture, for instance the white flower is used to denote “brilliant homework”

3. Ancient Wisdom
Although the story of the emoji, began in Japan in the mid-1990s when it was added as a special feature to a brand of pagers popular with teenagers,the roots of smiley faces and emoticons go back to the 1880s!!

4. Faster than A Speeding…Word
According to the website Emojitracker, which uses Twitter to calculate emoji usage, people are averaging 250 to 350 emoji tweets a second!

Image from The New York Times Even long stories can be reduced to a small string of symbols. Comprehension may still be a problem, however. Credit James C. Best, Jr. for The New York Times

5. Puncuate That Excited Face 
Having to switch keyboards to key in punctuations? The excited face is a replacement for exclamation marks!

6. Stay Away From Guns
Widespread use of emoji have led legal experts to discuss whether an emoji death threat [gun and face] could be admissible in court.

7. Different Heart Beats
Note to givers of hearts! Emoji tend to mistranslate when sent between platforms, or they get jumbled if you don’t have the right font. So while a heart may be a heart on your phone, it may end up as a series of glitch squares on Facebook or if you read your email in Chrome.

8. Top Trending Word of 2014
Emoji was crowned as this year’s top-trending word by the Global Language Monitor…isn’t ironic? Oh yes, which is the icon for irony…anyone?

9. Show Me Emoji and I’ll Tell You What’s Wrong with Your Life
Yes…you may have your Freudian or Jung complexes solved by sending a screen shot of your recently used emoji texts to Emojinalysis

10. When A Yes Means Uh…
In case you didn’t realize, thumbs up is also used when you don’t really know what to say, but don’t want to be rude by not responding…and when you just don’t really want to respond at all.