Where did emojis come from?

The first widely used emoji set was designed in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita in Japan for the NTT DoCoMo i-mode mobile service. The word emoji itself comes from Japanese — 絵 (e, “picture”) + 文字 (moji, “character”).

In 2010 Unicode 6.0 added emojis to the international standard, which let every operating system render the same characters consistently across the world.