Emoji: Not as Universal as You Think

Every day, billions of emoji are sent across the world. Meta says people send more than 2.4 billion messages with emoji on Messenger alone each day.¹ They appear in text messages, business emails, court evidence, and even presidential tweets. Yet despite their global reach, emoji remain one of the easiest digital signals to misread across contexts.

Where Emoji Come From

The word “emoji” is Japanese: e (絵，“picture”) + moji (文字，“character”). Despite what many English speakers assume, it has nothing to do with the English word “emotion.” The resemblance between “emoji” and “emoticon” is pure coincidence.²

The story usually starts with Shigetaka Kurita, a Japanese artist who created 176 emoji in 1999 for NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode mobile internet service. Kurita’s challenge was to communicate information in a format limited to 250 characters per message. His solution: a set of 12×12 pixel images inspired by manga, weather symbols, and street signs. These tiny squares were simple enough to render on early mobile screens, yet expressive enough to add emotional context that plain text lacked.³

But Kurita’s set was not actually the first. SoftBank (then J-Phone) shipped 90 emoji on the SkyWalker DP-211SW phone in November 1997 — including the now-iconic poo emoji. Even earlier, recent emoji-history research has pointed to Sharp portable devices, with the Sharp PA-8500 released in October 1988 containing what some researchers consider the earliest known emoji-like set.⁴

What made Kurita’s 176 emoji different was their scale of adoption. i-mode became massively popular in Japan, rival carriers copied the idea, and by the mid-2000s, emoji were a standard part of Japanese digital life. In 2010, the Unicode Consortium — the nonprofit that maintains the global standard for digital text — encoded emoji in the Unicode Standard with Unicode 6.0. Later Unicode documentation notes that 722 Unicode emoji historically corresponded to the Japanese carrier sets, though three of those were space characters rather than emoji-style symbols in practice.⁵ By the early 2010s, smartphone platforms had helped push emoji well beyond Japan and into mainstream global use.⁵

Today, there are 3,953 emoji in the Unicode Standard as of Emoji 17.0, approved in September 2025. The original 176 are now part of the permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.⁶

Why Emoji Are Not a Language

Linguists have been clear on this point: emoji do not constitute a language. That matters because people often expect emoji to do more communicative work than they really can. They lack every essential feature that defines one.

No grammar. There are no rules for how emoji combine. The sequence 🍕❤️🎉 could mean “I love pizza parties,” “pizza, love, celebration,” or nothing specific at all. There is no syntax to disambiguate.

No productive morphology. You cannot create new meanings by modifying an emoji the way you can add “-ed” or “-ing” to an English verb. The vocabulary is fixed by committee and only changes when Unicode approves new additions.

No negation. There is no reliable way to say “not” with emoji. You cannot negate a statement, ask a conditional question, or express a hypothetical situation.

No consistent vocabulary. The same emoji means different things to different people, different generations, and different cultures. Only 7% of people use the 🍑 peach emoji to refer to actual fruit, according to an Emojipedia and Prismoji study.⁷

What emoji actually do is function as a paralinguistic tool — similar to gestures, tone of voice, or facial expressions. They supplement written language rather than replace it. When you add 😊 to a text message, you are doing the same thing you would do by smiling while speaking: adding emotional context to words that might otherwise sound flat or ambiguous.

As Keith Broni, editor-in-chief of Emojipedia, puts it: emoji are “at most a linguistic tool used to complement our language.”⁸

In practical terms, that leads to three recurring problems:

• Emoji add tone, but they do not replace grammar.
• Meanings shift across cultures, communities, and generations.
• Platform design changes can alter how the same emoji feels to the reader.

The Same Emoji, Different Meanings

One of the most persistent claims about emoji is that they are a “universal language” — a visual code that transcends linguistic barriers. This myth falls apart the moment you look at how emoji are actually interpreted across cultures.

👍 Thumbs Up. In many Western contexts, this usually signals approval or agreement. In some other cultural settings, including parts of the Middle East, the same gesture can read as rude or overly blunt. Even within English-speaking digital culture, a lone 👍 can feel dismissive depending on the relationship and context.⁹

😊 Slightly Smiling Face. Americans often read this as friendly. In some Chinese online contexts, the same emoji can imply distrust, sarcasm, or a politely dismissive tone. Because it is less enthusiastic than 😄 or 😁, it can sometimes read as restrained or insincere rather than warm.⁸

👏 Clapping Hands. In the West, this usually means applause or congratulations. In some Chinese internet contexts, the clapping sound resembles “啪啪啪” (pā pā pā), so the emoji can take on a sexual meaning.⁸

😇 Angel / Halo. In much Western usage, this suggests innocence or goodness. In some Chinese contexts, it can be associated with death or carry an unsettling tone.⁸

🙏 Folded Hands. Western users often read this as prayer or “please.” In Japan, where emoji originated, it is also commonly understood as “thank you” or “I’m sorry.” In other settings, people may not map it neatly onto prayer at all.⁹

👌 OK Sign. In many contexts, it signals approval. In others, it can read as insulting or politically loaded, which makes it a poor candidate for a supposedly universal symbol.⁹

👋 Waving Hand. Often a friendly hello or goodbye, but like many gesture-based emoji, its tone can shift with local norms and online subcultures.⁹

A 2017 study of Ramadan-related tweets showed the pattern clearly: English, German, Spanish, and Turkish tweets overwhelmingly used ❤️ (red heart), while Arabic, Urdu, and Farsi tweets favored 🌙 (crescent moon). The 🙏 emoji ranked in the top three for Western and Southeast Asian users, but only ninth for Arabic speakers.⁸

These are not just rare misunderstandings. Research on emoji use repeatedly finds that cultural background, platform rendering, and local conventions all shape interpretation, which means misreading is built into the medium rather than limited to edge cases.¹⁰

The Generation Gap

The divide is not only geographic — it is generational. Gen Z users have quietly redefined entire emoji. The 💀 skull now means “I’m dying of laughter,” a usage that confuses older millennials who read it literally. The 😂 face with tears of joy, once the internet’s default laugh, is increasingly seen as uncool by younger users who prefer 💀 or 🗿 instead.

As Broni observed in a 2024 interview, Gen Z users actively “code-switch” their emoji — they know not to send a 💀 to an older colleague who might take it the wrong way, and will default to 😂 when tailoring their tone to a different audience.¹¹

How the Same Emoji Looks Different on Every Phone

Even when two people agree on what an emoji means, they may not see the same image. Each platform — Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, WhatsApp — designs its own visual interpretation of each Unicode character. The results can differ dramatically.

The most famous example is the pistol emoji (🔫). In August 2016, Apple replaced its realistic revolver with a bright green water gun on iOS 10. The same day, Microsoft went the opposite direction — changing its toy ray gun into a real revolver. For months, a message sent as a joke from an iPhone could arrive looking like a genuine threat on a Windows device.¹²

The larger problem has been documented in research as well: platform-specific renderings can shift the perceived sentiment of the same emoji, sometimes enough to change how a message feels to the reader.¹²

By 2018, after the Parkland school shooting and subsequent anti-gun-violence demonstrations, Google, Samsung, Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp all switched to water guns. The consensus held until July 2024, when X (formerly Twitter) reverted to a realistic M1911 handgun, with Elon Musk calling the water gun version a product of “the woke mind virus.”¹²

Beyond the gun, cross-platform rendering causes subtler problems every day. Samsung’s cookie emoji once appeared as a pair of saltine crackers. Google’s burger emoji famously had the cheese under the patty, prompting enough ridicule that Google released a fix. The “grimacing face” emoji looked genuinely distressed on some platforms and merely awkward on others.¹³

Emoji in the Courtroom

Emoji have entered legal territory — and courts are struggling to keep up.

That does not mean emoji are inherently risky. It means that once messages become evidence, small visual cues can suddenly take on outsized importance.

In a widely cited 2017 case in Israel (Dahan v. Shacharoff), a prospective tenant sent a landlord messages with enthusiastic emoji — including a dancing woman, a champagne bottle, and a chipmunk. The landlord took the apartment off the market. When the tenant ghosted, the court ruled that the emoji “support the conclusion the defendants acted in bad faith” and awarded the landlord approximately $2,200 in damages.¹⁴

In the United States, the number of court cases involving emoji as evidence climbed from 33 in 2017 to 53 in 2018, with nearly 50 in just the first half of 2019, according to Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University who monitors such opinions.¹⁵

The cases span a wide range:

• A 12-year-old girl in Virginia faced felony charges in 2015 for an Instagram post that included the pistol, knife, and bomb emoji, construed as a death threat.¹²
• A 22-year-old man in France was jailed for three months and fined €1,000 in 2016 for sending his ex-girlfriend a gun emoji.¹²
• In a sex-trafficking case in California, an expert witness testified that a crown emoji, high heels, and bags of money constituted evidence of prostitution — the crown being a common reference to a pimp.¹⁵

The core problem is interpretation. No court guidelines exist for how judges should handle emoji. Some describe emoji verbally to jurors rather than showing them. Others omit emoji from evidence entirely. As one attorney told CNN: “Someone may use threatening symbols, a gun, a pointed finger, and then behind it put a symbol for ‘just joking.’ There is a lot that could get lost in the translation.”¹⁵

Who Decides Which Emoji Exist

Every emoji on your keyboard exists because a committee approved it.

The Unicode Consortium is the nonprofit that maintains the Unicode Standard — the system that ensures text displays consistently across all devices and platforms. Its voting members include Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and other tech giants. Each year, usually between April and July, the consortium opens a submission window where anyone can propose a new emoji.⁵

Proposals must include evidence of demand, potential for frequent use, and visual distinctiveness. The Emoji Standard & Research Working Group reviews submissions, and the Unicode Technical Committee makes final decisions. The process takes roughly 18–24 months from proposal to keyboard.

This means that a small group of people — mostly engineers and product managers at major tech companies — effectively controls the global emoji vocabulary. The political dimensions are real. In 2016, Apple successfully pressured the consortium to reject a proposed rifle emoji. Five new skin tones were added in 2015 after years of criticism that emoji defaulted to white. Same-sex couple emoji arrived the same year.¹²

As of Emoji 17.0 (September 2025), the additions included a distorted smiley face, an orca, a treasure chest, ballet dancers, and a Bigfoot-inspired “hairy creature.”⁶

Can You Actually Translate Emoji?

In 2017, London-based translation agency Today Translations hired Keith Broni as the world’s first Emoji Translator, beating out over 500 applicants. His job: help companies understand how emoji meanings shift across cultures and platforms, and advise on safe usage in international marketing and communications.¹¹

Broni’s work suggests that emoji “translation” is a real communication need, not just a novelty. A thumbs-up in a marketing email might alienate some customers. A clapping emoji in a Chinese social media campaign could be misread. A slightly smiling face sent by a Western manager to a Chinese colleague might come across as passive-aggressive rather than friendly.

The challenge goes beyond cultural meaning. It extends to the practical reality that emoji are embedded in text alongside actual language — and when that text needs to be translated, the emoji context matters.

If you are working across languages and need to communicate clearly — whether in business emails, marketing copy, or product content — the safest approach is to rely on words first and use emoji sparingly and deliberately. If the message itself needs translation, it helps to translate the full sentence or document rather than assume the emoji will carry the tone on its own. Tools like OpenL can help with document translation when clarity matters across languages. The emoji can stay where they work best: as optional seasoning, not the main ingredient.

How to Use Emoji Safely Across Cultures

If you communicate across languages or markets, a few simple habits reduce most emoji-related misunderstandings:

• Use words for meaning, emoji for tone. Do not rely on an emoji to carry the main point of a sentence, especially in customer support, contracts, or marketing claims.
• Avoid gesture emoji in formal global communication. Symbols like 👍, 🙏, 👌, and 👋 are exactly the ones most likely to shift across cultures and contexts.
• Test emoji-heavy copy on the target platform. The same message can feel different on iPhone, Android, Windows, or X because the rendering changes.
• Be extra cautious with humor, sarcasm, and flirtation. These are the situations where cultural context matters most and misreadings become most expensive.
• When in doubt, leave it out. If the message still works without the emoji, that is often the safer choice for cross-border communication.

What Emoji Tell Us About Communication

Emoji are not a language. They are not universal. They are not even consistent across the phone in your pocket and the phone in your colleague’s pocket.

What they are is a fascinating mirror of how humans communicate. We crave emotional context in our written messages. We reach for visual shorthand when words feel too slow or too formal. And we constantly, inevitably, misunderstand each other — because meaning is always shaped by culture, context, and the specific human being on the other end.

The next time you reach for an emoji, remember: the little picture you see is not necessarily the picture someone else receives. And the meaning you intend is not always the meaning that arrives.

That is what makes emoji useful and risky at the same time. They can make writing feel warmer and more human, but they also expose how much communication depends on shared context rather than symbols alone.

In casual chat, that ambiguity is often harmless. In customer support, international marketing, or legal settings, the same ambiguity can become expensive very quickly.

When words need to cross languages, don’t leave them to chance — or to a 🙂 that might mean something you never intended.

For more on how meaning shifts across languages and cultures, see our guides on 50 untranslatable words and why some languages have no word for “please”.

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Footnotes

1. “Introducing Soundmojis on Messenger for Emoji Day,” Meta Newsroom, July 15, 2021. Meta says people send more than 2.4 billion messages with emoji on Messenger each day. ↩

2. “Inbox: The Original Emoji, by Shigetaka Kurita,” MoMA. MoMA notes that emoji comes from e (“picture”) + moji (“character”). ↩

3. “Inbox: The Original Emoji, by Shigetaka Kurita,” MoMA; “SoftBank 1997,” Emojipedia. These sources cover Kurita’s 176 emoji and the earlier 1997 SoftBank set. ↩

4. “New Earliest ‘Emoji’ Sets From 1988 & 1990 Uncovered,” Emojipedia Blog, May 13, 2024; “Sharp,” Emojipedia. These sources date the PA-8500 to October 1988 and describe it as the earliest known emoji-like set currently documented. ↩

5. “UTS #51: Unicode Emoji,” Unicode Consortium; “Unicode Version 6.0: Support for Popular Symbols in Asia,” Unicode Blog; “Inbox: The Original Emoji, by Shigetaka Kurita,” MoMA. These sources support the Unicode 6.0 history, carrier-set counts, and the broader rise of emoji into mainstream digital communication. ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. “Emoji Counts, v17.0,” Unicode Consortium; “Inbox: The Original Emoji, by Shigetaka Kurita,” MoMA. Unicode provides the current counts, and MoMA documents the acquisition of Kurita’s original 176 emoji. ↩ ↩²

7. Emojipedia and Prismoji peach emoji usage study, December 2016. ↩

8. “Why emoji mean different things in different cultures,” BBC Future, December 2018. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

9. “Beyond words: emoji patterns in cross-cultural branding,” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2026). The paper summarizes cross-cultural differences in emoji interpretation, including the thumbs-up example and East/West differences in reading facial cues. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

10. “A Systematic Review of Emoji: Current Research and Future Perspectives,” Frontiers in Psychology (2019). The review summarizes evidence that emoji interpretation shifts across cultures, platforms, and contexts. ↩

11. “The World’s First Emoji Translator,” Today Translations, May 2017. ↩ ↩²

12. “Cross-Platform Emoji Interpretation: Analysis, a Solution, and Applications,” arXiv (2017); “X Redesigns Water Pistol Emoji Back To A Firearm,” Emojipedia Blog (2024). The paper documents cross-platform sentiment differences; the Emojipedia article documents X’s 2024 redesign and the earlier cross-vendor shift. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

13. “Meet a guy who makes a living translating emojis,” CNBC, July 2017. Used here for the cookie/crackers and burger rendering examples. ↩

14. Dahan v. Shacharoff, 30823-08-16 (Herzliya Small Claims Court, Feb. 24, 2017). Analysis by Eric Goldman, “How a Chipmunk Emoji Cost an Israeli Texter $2,200,” Santa Clara University. ↩

15. “Emojis Are Increasingly Coming Up In Court Cases,” CBS News / CNN, July 2019. ↩ ↩² ↩³