The surprising history (and politics) of emoji, with Keith Houston

Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

Mignon Fogarty, Inc.

Society & Culture, Education

4.5 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 3 July 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

1096. This week, we look at the world of emoji with Keith Houston, author of "Face with Tears of Joy." He discusses the long history of emoji, from ancient origins to early computer character sets, and the formal process of proposing new emoji to the Unicode Consortium. We also look at how emoji can be blends of multiple characters and tell us more about cultural, generational, and political attitudes.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Grammar Girl here. I'm in Jan Fogarty, and on these Thursday shows, we talk about things that are generally interesting about language. And I am here with Keith Houston, who runs the blog Shady Characters. He has a book by the same name, Shady Characters, which is fabulous. And he has a new book called Face with Tears
0:22.3	of Joy, all about emoji. And emoji are also just a fascinating thing that we do with communication.
0:29.6	Keith, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So, you know,
0:34.4	emoji, I was surprised they go back much farther than I originally thought.
0:39.0	Can you talk a little bit about what was the first emoji?
0:43.3	I think it depends what you mean by emoji.
0:45.8	So there are smiley faces on prehistoric pots, for example, just a couple of dobs of ink or suit that show you a face.
0:53.6	If you then wait,, get into the medieval period
0:56.2	and a lot of readers, interestingly, not writers of books, but readers of books, would draw
1:01.6	little pictures in the margins to call out something interesting, little pointing hands,
1:06.2	and there are lots of pointing hand emoji. So you go from, okay, there are smiley faces and hands that look a bit
1:11.9	like emoji, and then eventually you get into 18th century Japan, and people are printing books,
1:17.4	which are composed not of Japanese logographic writing, but of actual pictures that are entire
1:23.1	stories told using only numbers and little pictures. And then if you'd like, well, what is that?
1:29.1	Is an emoji a yellow smiling face? The first of those was designed in the 1960s, the most iconic
1:34.1	one, the one that everyone would recognize, was designed by an American graphic designer called
1:38.7	Harvey Ball in 1960s. But if you finally get to an icon on a computer screen, then we're still not an emoji. Before
1:46.4	smartphones and before smart devices, just as the home computer was becoming more popular,
1:53.4	some of these computers had what were called, well, all computers have got what are called
1:56.6	character sets. This is a list of characters or symbols. The computer knows how to display.
2:02.0	And some of these, some of these fairly early, late 70s, early 80s ones have got characters
2:07.3	like little smiley faces and suits of cards and arrows and so on. And the idea was these
	...

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