emoji

You likely know that emoji originated in Japan, but do you know how they ended up basically everywhere in the world?

Emoji are perhaps one of the greatest “accidents” of contemporary technology. Now, we don’t mean the actual characters themselves — they were intentionally and deliberately created by Japanese cell phone companies decades ago. The “accident” aspect is that the little images are now everywhere in the world, enhancing (or ruining, depending on your perspective) our textual communication.

While you might think words and phrases like “standards,” “committees,” and “Unicode Consortium” sound terribly boring, this video by British YouTuber Tom Scott is actually a fun introduction to the topic. In addition to explaining the history, you’ll also find out what sort of emoji you can expect to be available this year and next!

If you do happen to recognize the red-shirted man in the video, you may very have seen his “Real Life Emoji Keyboard” video from last year. If you haven’t seen the video, we present it below in all its glory.

▼ Yes, in 2015, you needed 14 physical keyboards to represent all the available emoji.

If you’re interested in learning more about how text works on all your electronic devices, the YouTuber was also featured in this Computerphile video explaining the “Unicode Miracle.” It’s a bit more technical, but absolutely fascinating if you’re at all interested in computers and technology.

And if you don’t really care for emoji, at least you can rest easy knowing that emoji fashion doesn’t seem to have turned into a huge thing. Yet.

Source/images: YouTube/Tom Scott