As we saw in part 1, emoji did not arise in a vacuum. In designing his suite of icons, Shigetaka Kurita selected subjects that would be both recognisable and useful in the context of NTT DOCOMOâs new mobile internet service. Smiling faces (đ) and broken hearts (đ) conveyed emotion; trains (đ) and planes (âď¸) called up ticket booking services; videogame controllers (đŽ) denoted mobile games; and so on. But the way in which emoji were and are presented â embedded among our letters and words while simultaneously being distinct from them â has always been as important as their content. In this respect, emoji owe as much to ancient scrolls, medieval books and typewriters as they do to pagers and mobile phones.
It feels redundant to say so, especially on a blog about punctuation, but the letters both of our alphabet and of others have never travelled alone. There have always been a select few non-alphabetic characters along for the ride. Some are functional, such as the marks of punctuation that form part of our written language; others are decorative; and still more live somewhere between the two extremes. In ancient Greece, for example, elaborate coronides marked the ends of books and poems.1 In Rome, K-shaped capitula, or âlittle headsâ, signalled the start of each new section of a work and would later evolve into the pilcrow (Âś), or paragraph mark. And both Greek and Roman scribes were partial to using hedera, or ivy leaves (âŚ), to break up lengthy passages.2

Later, as the paged codex supplanted the scroll, writers added yet more auxiliary marks such as asterisks (*), crosses (â ) and daggers (â )3,4 with which they organised footnotes and other asides. Some symbols were so important that it was the job of specialist scribes called ârubricatorsâ to add them in contrasting red or blue ink after the fact.5 Readers, too, could not resist embellishing the page with their own marks, many of which took the form of little inky hands, or manicules (â), that danced alongside the text to point out noteworthy passages.

Konrad Peutingerâs Romanae Vetvstatis Fragmenta In Avgvsta Vindelicorvm Et Eivs Dioecesi, printed in 1505 by Erhard Ratdolt. Words are separated by wedge-shaped interpuncts that mimic ancient Roman inscriptions. (CC-BY-SA 3.0 image Š Herzog August Bibliothek WolfenbĂźttel. Romanae Vetvstatis Fragmenta In Avgvsta Vindelicorvm Et Eivs Dioecesi [Conradus Peutinger].)
Some of these marks crossed over to the printed page, although the difficulties of printing in multiple colours meant that rubricators were still called in to add them by hand.5 The pilcrow (Âś) was one such mark, inked into blank spaces left by the printer at the head of each paragraph. But when the growing tide of printed books started to outpace the abilities of rubricators to decorate them, the pilcrow fell by the wayside to leave behind the modern indented paragraph.6,7*
The pilcrowâs disappearance was symptomatic of a broader change in typographic sensibilities. Not only did mass production put rubricators out of business but, in the pursuit of readability, many printers favoured an aethetic style notable mostly for its lack of ornamentation. Gutenberg himself used only letters, abbreviations and a handful of punctuation marks for his pioneering 42-line Bible, for example,8 while the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, active a few decades later, cemented the trend with a series of sparsely-decorated pocket-sized books that would set the tone for centuries to come.9
There was more trouble in store in the late nineteenth century when the invention of the typewriter dealt another blow to typographic sophistication. Conceived primarily as a tool for business, the typewriterâs QWERTY keyboard bore only letters, numbers, a few marks of punctuation and a dollar sign. Even the digits â0â and â1â were omitted: why waste the keys when the letters âOâ and âIâ would do just as well in their place?10,11 First, printers had deemed it recherchĂŠ to use too many ornamental characters; now the typewriter made it impossible to type them in the first place.12 The era of the typographic special character seemed to be over.
As it happened, the arid environment of the typewriter keyboard was more fertile than it seemed. There might be no pointing fingers or ivy leaves immediately to hand, but the letters, numbers and symbols that remained could be combined to make entirely new designs. And so almost as soon as the typewriter had arrived, secretaries, stenographers and writers created the new medium of typewriter art, in which mundane typewritten characters became the raw material for increasingly creative graphic artworks.13

By the early 1980s the QWERTY keyboard had become the interface to a new world of computers and networking, and typewriter art was along for the ride. Graphical user interfaces were still rare (Appleâs Lisa went on sale in 1983; the Mac a year later14,15) and computer users were accustomed to word processors, spreadsheets and games presenting themselves using only the ninety-five printable characters of the ASCII character set.16 (There was, inevitably, an accompanying fad for âASCII pr0nâ â titillating images composed of nothing more than the symbols on the computer keyboard.17 Who could have predicted that the internet would become a hotbed of such iniquitous material?)
It was into this text-only world that emojiâs first true ancestor was born. Comprising only a colon, a hyphen and a closing parenthesis, the emoticon, or :-), was perfectly designed to pierce the disinterested blankness of a CRT monitor. Granted, so-called emoticons have been discovered in many pre-digital sources, such as seventeenth century poems:
Tumble me down, and I will sit
Upon my ruins, (smiling yet:)
Tear me to tatters, yet Iâll be
Patient in my necessity.18
and transcriptions of Abraham Lincolnâs speeches:
âŚthere is no precedent for your being here yourselves, (applause and laughter ;) and I offer, in justification of myself and you, that I have found nothing in the Constitution against.19
but these are almost certainly typographic missteps rather than intentional smileys. The consensus is that emoticons proper arrived in 1982 in response to a joke gone wrong on an electronic bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University. We open the scene with a puzzle posed by CMU computer scientist Neil Swartz:
16-Sep-82 12:09 Neil Swartz at CMU-750R Pigeon type question This question does not involve pigeons, but is similar: There is a lit candle in an elevator mounted on a bracket attached to the middle of one wall (say, 2" from the wall). A drop of mercury is on the floor. The cable snaps and the elevator falls. What happens to the candle and the mercury?
There followed a complaint that a mercury spill was no laughing matter, whether real or not. With tongues firmly in cheeks, Swartz and others took it upon themselves to discuss how such misunderstandings might be avoided in future. In the course of the debate, a colleague of Swartzâs named Scott Fahlman posted the immortal words:
19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-) I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use :-(
Enter the emoticon.
The genius of Fahlmanâs suggestion lay in the fact that just about any image of a human face, however abstract, will provoke an emotional reaction on the part of the viewer. So elemental were Fahlmanâs inventions that images just like them have been around for millennia: a 4,500-year-old carving found at NĂŽmes in France is claimed to be the worldâs oldest smiley;20 a 1700 BCE urn discovered on the border between Turkey and Syria, daubed with a distinctive :)
, runs it a close second;21 and similar doodles appear everywhere from medieval manuscripts to comic books. Nor is the modern stereotype of a smiley face an especially new invention. Designed in 1963 by a graphic artist named Harvey Ball, the iconic yellow smiley (đ is the closest analogous emoji) has since been co-opted as a symbol for everything from Walmart ad campaigns to acid house record covers.22,23 Even Ingmar Bergman, the famously morose film director, got in on the smiley action. Of course, he chose a âfrownyâ instead, drawn in lipstick on a mirror in his 1948 film Port of Call: ââšâ.24

Unsurprisingly, then, Fahlmanâs happy and unhappy faces struck a chord, spreading first to other universities and then out into the world at large. As they did so, they multplied. In a November 1982 message sent to a colleague at Xeroxâs Palo Alto Research Center, CMUâs James Morris expanded the lexicon:25â
(:-) for messages dealing with bicycle helmets @= for messages dealing with nuclear war <:-) for dumb questions oo for somebody's head-lights are on messages o>-<|= for messages of interest to women ~= a candle, to annotate flaming messages
All very creative, and faithful to the spirit of Fahlmanâs own typewriter art writ small. But one of Morrisâs emoticons in particular anticipated a problem that still vexes emoji users today: when one group of people control a medium, it is easy to marginalise people outside that group. The o>-<|= emoticon, for âmessages of interest to womenâ was as blithely exclusionary then as the preponderance of male emoji has been until very recently.
Emoticons got their first major upgrade in 1986 in the form of kaomoji, or âface charactersâ. In that year, a Japanese message board user named Yasushi Wakabayashi began signing his posts with his online alias, âWakan,â follwed by a creative assemblage of characters forming a face: (^Â _Â ^). Like Fahlman, Yasushi maintains a modest web page describing his part in the invention of kaomoji, where he explains that he wanted to make a smiley that could be immediately understood by all readers. In particular, he wanted his mark to be âright way upâ so that readers would see it as a face without having to mentally rotate it through 90 degrees. Perhaps coincidentally, this means that both emoticons and kaomoji are aligned perpendicular to their native scripts: traditional emoticons lie at right angles to texts written in the Latin alphabet, while kaomoji spring from Japanese characters that are more often written from top to bottom.26
At first, only a few people understood what the collection of characters in Wakanâs signature were supposed to mean and today, as kaomoji grow ever more complex, they can still be difficult to decipher. The archetypal âshruggieâ (âÂŻ\_(ă)_/ÂŻâ), for example, is relatively straightforward, as is the gloriously unhinged âtable flipâ (â(ăಠçಠ)ă彥âťââťâ), but others are not so easily parsed â consider ŕźźâáŚŰáŚâŕź˝ (one of many kaomoji meaning âhungerâ) or (#´âď˝âŤ)⍠(âslow clapâ), for example.27 And yet, after a slow start, suddenly Yasushiâs kaomoji were everywhere in Japan, taking their place alongside Scott Fahlmanâs smileys as the new emotional currency of the internet.
At least, that is, until 1999, when emoji crashed the party.
If it was not immediately apparent that NTT DOCOMOâs little icons were destined for great things, their graduation in 2007 to Googleâs Gmail and then, a year later, to Appleâs iPhone made it clear that something important was afoot.28,29 Google searches for âemojiâ crept upwards just as those for âemoticonâ tailed off.30 A drumbeat of tech news articles told Western iPhone owners how to unlock the hitherto Japan-only icons on their keyboards.29 The fate of the emoticon had been sealed, and today the likes of :-), ;-P, :-(, and :-D have been almost completely replaced by âđâ, âđâ, âđâ, âđâ and more.
And yet emojiâs seemingly effortless rise was anything but. More on that next time.
- 1.
- F Schironi, âBook-Ends and Book-Layout in Papyri With Hexametric Poetryâ, in, 2010. â˘
- 2.
- Robert Bringhurst, âHederaâ, in The Elements of Typographic Style : Version 3.2, 2008, 311-. â˘
- 3.
- M B Parkes, âThe Technology of Printing and the Stabilization of the Symbolsâ, in, 1993, 50-64. â˘
- 4.
- R A Sayce, âCompositorial Practices and the Localization of Printed Books, 1530â1800â, 1966. â˘
- 5.
- Geoffrey Glaister A, âRubricatorâ, Glossary of the Book, 1960. â˘
- 6.
- Andrew Haslam, âArticulating Meaning: Paragraphsâ, in Book Design, 2006, 73-74. â˘
- 7.
- Jan Tschichold and Robert Bringhurst, âWhy the Beginnings of Paragraphs Must Be Indentedâ, in The Form of the Book: Essays on the Morality of Good Design, 1991, 105-9. â˘
- 8.
- S FĂźssel, âBringing the Technical Inventions Togetherâ, in, 2005, 15-18. â˘
- 9.
- âAldus Manutius, Scholar-Printer (c.1445-1515)â, nls.Uk, Mayâ2012. â˘
- 10.
- C E Weller, âHome of First Typewriterâ, in The Early History of the Typewriter, 1921, 20-21. â˘
- 11.
- Christopher Latham Sholes, âImprovement in Type-Writing Machines. U.S. Patent 207,559.â, Augustâ1878. â˘
- 12.
- J L Bell, âDash It All!â, Oz and Ends, Marchâ2009. â˘
- 13.
- Maria Popova, âA Visual History of Typewriter Art from 1893 to Todayâ, Brain Pickings, 2014. â˘
- 14.
- Christoph Dernbach, âApple Lisaâ, Mac History, 2007. â˘
- 15.
- Christoph Dernbach, âThe History of the Apple Macintoshâ, Mac History, 2011. â˘
- 16.
- Vint Cerf, âRFC 20: ASCII Format for Network Interchangeâ, ed. Network Working Group, Octoberâ1969. â˘
- 17.
- K Mey, Art and Obscenity, 2006. â˘
- 18.
- Levi Stahl, âThe First Emoticon?â, Ivebeenreadinglately, 2014. â˘
- 19.
- Jennifer 8. Lee, âIs That an Emoticon in 1862?â, New York Times. â˘
- 20.
- Danny Kringiel, âMillionen fĂźr Ein Lächelnâ, Spiegel Online, 2011. â˘
- 21.
- Zuhal Uzundere Kocalar, âAncient Pot Discovery in Turkey Contests Smiley Originâ, Andalou Agency, 2017. â˘
- 22.
- Jack Neff, âWalmart Brings Back the Smiley Face in Ads and in Storeâ, Ad Age, 2016. â˘
- 23.
- Christian Bernard-Cedervall and Antonin Pruvot, âHow Did the Smiley Face Became an Icon of Rave Culture?â, Trax, 2016. â˘
- 24.
- Ingmar Bergman, âPort of Callâ, 1948. â˘
- 25.
- Scott Fahlman, ââJokeâ Conversation Thread in Which the :-) Was Inventedâ, Scott E. Fahlman. â˘
- 26.
- čĽććł°ĺż, âéĄćĺăŽčľˇćş ({\^{}}_{\^{}})â. â˘
- 27.
- â10,000+ Japanese Emoticons, Kaomoji, Text Faces & Dongersâ, JapaneseEmoticons.Me. â˘
- 28.
- Lauren Schwartzberg, âThe Oral History Of The Poop Emoji (Or, How Google Brought Poop To America)â, Fast Company, 2014. â˘
- 29.
- Arnold Kim, âIPhone 2.2 Includes Hidden Japanese Emoji Iconsâ, Mac Rumors, 2008. â˘
- 30.
- âEmoticon, Kaomoji, Emojiâ, Google Trends. â˘
- *
- You can read more about the pilcrow here at Shady Characters. â˘
- â
- Iâve also written previously in more detail about Fahlmanâs invention. â˘
Comment posted by Nancy on
Thank you!
Comment posted by Keith Houston on
Not at all!
Comment posted by Michael Hurley on
I’m quite surprised you made no mention of the famous typographical face art published in an 1881 edition of “Puck” magazine. They were specifically designed to conveigh emotion through basic typographical characters and are considered by some to be the earliest true proto-emoticons yet known.
Comment posted by Keith Houston on
Hi Michael,
I left out the Puck emoticons for a couple of reasons — first, I’ve already written about them in the Shady Characters book, and second, as far as I know they were never used within the text itself.
Thanks for the comment!
Comment posted by Phillip Helbig on
“Even IngÂmar BergÂman, the famÂously morÂose film dirÂector,”
While some of his films are rather gloomy (but, at the same time, some of the best films ever made), privately he was a cheerful fellow. I remember seeing an interview with him around the time of his death, in which he laughed a lot.
With 4 wives and 9 children (with only 1, Liv Ullmann’s daughter, from an unwed mother) he wasn’t all doom and gloom. His marriages and children are more complicated than described in this brief comment, and allegedly all were always on friendly terms with one another.
Comment posted by Keith Houston on
Hi Phillip — thanks for the comment! I’ll defer to you on this one. For the sake of brevity, I’ll leave the post as is.