The Origins of Emoticons and Emojis: How Different Cultures Express Emotions Through Text

Would you believe that just a few characters on a screen can make someone laugh? Today, opening your smartphone reveals hundreds of emojis ready to greet you — but their beginnings were remarkably humble. On September 19, 1982, a computer scientist posted three symbols on a bulletin board, :-) , and changed the history of written communication forever. What’s fascinating is that while the West chose a sideways face to convey the same emotion, Korea developed ^^ and ㅠㅠ, and Japan invented (^_^). Different writing systems give rise to different ways of expressing feelings — and in this article, we’ll trace that remarkable history.

Emoticons Before Emoticons: Puck Magazine’s 1881 Experiment

A full century before the digital emoticon was born, people were already trying to express emotions through print. On March 30, 1881, the American satirical magazine Puck ran a brief column titled “Typographical Art.” It featured four facial expressions made from punctuation marks and type, representing Joy, Melancholy, Indifference, and Astonishment.^[1]

This was, of course, a one-off piece of humor that never caught on. But it demonstrates that the human desire to convey emotion through text alone is a very old one.

1982: The Birth of :-)

The history of the modern emoticon begins at 11:44 a.m. on September 19, 1982. Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, posted the following message to the department’s electronic bulletin board:^[2]

19-Sep-82 11:44    Scott E  Fahlman
From: Scott E  Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>

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

:-(

The context behind this post: the bulletin board was in the middle of a debate about a physics puzzle — could a canary fly inside a free-falling elevator? As humorous posts and serious ones became mixed together and caused confusion, Fahlman proposed :-) to mark jokes, and :-( for negative sentiments.^[3]

:-) came with the instruction “Read it sideways” — and this became the defining feature of Western emoticons: the sideways (horizontal) design. The emoticon initially spread only within Carnegie Mellon, but within months it had propagated across ARPANET and Usenet to reach the entire world.^[4] The Guinness World Records officially recognizes this post as the first digital emoticon.^[5]

The Character of Western Emoticons: Faces Meant to Be Read Sideways

Why do Western emoticons lie on their side? The answer lies in the alphabet itself. Languages based on the Roman alphabet, including English, are read from left to right in a horizontal flow. The keyboard layout — where colons (:) become eyes, hyphens (-) become noses, and parentheses (), () become mouths — naturally maps onto this horizontal reading orientation.

Characteristic Western emoticons:

• :-) Smile
• :-( Frown
• ;-) Wink
• :-D Grin
• :-O Surprise
• :'( Crying

What all these have in common is their focus on the mouth. The direction of the parenthesis is the key element that distinguishes happiness from sadness. Psychological research suggests that in American and Western European cultures, the area around the mouth is considered the most important cue for reading emotion. A study by behavioral scientist Masaki Yuki of Hokkaido University found that Americans place greater weight on the mouth when judging the emotion of an emoticon, while Japanese participants rely more on the eyes.^[6]

The Character of Korean Emoticons: Faces That Look Straight Ahead

Korean emoticons evolved in a completely different direction from their Western counterparts. The defining characteristic of Korean emoticons is their upright (vertical) orientation — you can read them as a face without tilting your head at all.

Characteristic Korean emoticons:

• ^^ Smile (eyes curved into a smile)
• -_- Blank expression or exhaustion
• ㅠㅠ / ㅜㅜ Crying with tears
• ㅎㅎ Gentle laughter (ㅎ mimics the sound of soft laughter)
• ㅋㅋ Loud laughter (ㅋ represents the sound “kkk”)
• T.T Tears (the T shape shows tears falling from the eyes)

Among these, ㅋㅋ and ㅠㅠ are uniquely possible in Korean. The Korean writing system (Hangul) is composed of consonants and vowels, and even individual consonants can carry visual meaning on their own. ㅋ is the initial consonant of the laughing sound “kk-kk,” ㅎ is a softer variant of “ha-ha,” and ㅠ and ㅜ visually depict tears flowing downward from the eyes.^[7]

The reason Korean emoticons developed in an upright orientation is tied to the structure of Hangul. Each letter of the Korean alphabet has its own distinct visual form that carries expressive power even without being combined into syllable blocks. Korean culture also tends to emphasize the eyes as the seat of emotion, making eye-centered expressions like ^^ a natural preference.

Japanese Kaomoji (顔文字): Emoticons as Art

Among East Asian emoticons, Japan’s kaomoji (顔文字, “face characters”) are especially sophisticated. A compound of kao (顔, face) and moji (文字, character), kaomoji were first documented on June 20, 1986, when Wakabayashi Yasushi used (^_^) on ASCII NET, an early Japanese online service.^[8]

There are three decisive ways kaomoji differ from Western emoticons.

First, the upright structure. Kaomoji don’t require you to tilt your head. In (^_^), the ^ symbols are smiling eyes and _ is the mouth.

Second, the primacy of the eyes. Where Western emoticons express emotion through the mouth, kaomoji place emotional meaning in the eyes. In expressions like (T_T), (;_;), and (>_<), the shape of the eyes determines the overall emotional tone. This reflects a tendency in Japanese culture to restrain outward emotional expression. Eyes are difficult to conceal, while the mouth can be hidden behind a mask or a controlled expression.^[9]

Third, the use of full-width and special characters. By drawing on the full-width characters and special symbols supported in Japanese computer systems, kaomoji can achieve levels of complexity that are simply impossible on a Western keyboard:

• (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ Flipping a table in rage
• (ノ◕ヮ◕)ノ*:･ﾟ✧ Joy and celebration
• (´･ω･\)` Sadness
• ヽ(・∀・)ﾉ Excitement

Kaomoji spread widely through Japan’s anonymous online community 2channel (2ちゃんねる, now 5channel), and today they have deeply permeated Western internet culture as well.^[10]

Why Does the West Go Sideways While East Asia Goes Upright?

This difference is no accident. It is the inevitable result of distinct writing systems and cultural backgrounds.

The Influence of Writing Systems

Western alphabets arrange consonants and vowels in a linear sequence. The symbols on a keyboard are also perceived as a horizontal sequence, so combining them to form a face naturally produces something that lies on its side.

East Asian writing systems, by contrast, contain far richer visual elements. Hangul letters combine into syllable-block units, while Chinese characters and Japanese kana were designed to maintain balance within a square grid. These characters already had forms that could naturally serve as facial components.

Cultural Differences in Reading Emotion

Psychological studies consistently show that people in the East and West read facial expressions differently.^[11] Western cultures read emotion through the mouth — through smiles and frowns. In East Asian cultures, particularly Japan and Korea, the eyes serve as the primary emotional cue. This difference is directly reflected in how emoticons are designed.

In one study, participants were shown two emoticons — one with smiling eyes and a frowning mouth, and one with frowning eyes and a smiling mouth. Japanese participants rated the first as more positive, while American participants rated the second as more positive.^[12]

1999: The Birth of Emoji

While text-based emoticons continued to evolve, a completely different approach was emerging in Japan. In 1999, Shigetaka Kurita (栗田穣崇), a designer at Japan’s largest telecommunications company NTT DOCOMO, created the first set of emoji (絵文字).^[13]

Kurita faced a new challenge as he prepared to launch DOCOMO’s mobile internet service, i-mode. Messages on i-mode were limited to 250 characters, and he needed a way to convey emotion and information efficiently within that constraint. Drawing inspiration from Japanese manga, road signs, and Chinese ideographic characters, he designed 176 pictograms, each fitting within a 12×12 pixel grid.^[14]

The first emoji were far from the polished graphics we know today. They were monochrome icons measuring just 12×12 pixels — yet they covered a broad range of everyday situations, from weather (☀️ ☔) to transport (🚃 🚌) to emotion (😊 😢).

Interestingly, the word “emoji” (絵文字) is a Japanese compound of e (絵, picture) and moji (文字, character) — etymologically unrelated to the English word “emoticon” (emotion + icon), though the sounds happen to be similar, which sometimes causes confusion. In 2016, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York added the original 176 emoji to its permanent collection.^[15]

Unicode Standardization and Global Spread

Kurita’s emoji were initially available only on DOCOMO devices. The problem was that different carriers used different emoji sets, meaning that sending an emoji between devices on different networks would result in garbled characters or completely different images on the receiving end.

Google stepped in to address this issue. In August 2007, a team led by Google’s Mark Davis petitioned the Unicode Technical Committee to standardize emoji. Apple’s Peter Edberg and Yasuo Kida followed, submitting a formal proposal in January 2009 for 625 new emoji characters.^[16]

The result: in October 2010, approximately 1,000 emoji were registered as part of Unicode 6.0. From that point on, emoji became a universal script that could be displayed identically on any digital device, regardless of country or carrier.^[17]

Apple introduced an emoji keyboard in Japanese iOS 2.2 in 2008, then made it available to all users worldwide starting with iOS 5.0 in 2011.^[18] Google began supporting emoji in Gmail in 2008, and as Android adopted them more fully, emoji became part of the everyday language of smartphone users everywhere.

The Modern Era: Stickers and Messaging Apps

After Unicode emoji were standardized, emoticon culture entered a new phase: the age of stickers.

KakaoTalk Emoticons

South Korea’s KakaoTalk opened its “Kakao Emoticon Shop” in 2013, creating a platform where illustrators and artists could produce and sell their own character emoticons. By 2020, annual revenue from the sticker shop had surpassed $340 million — roughly one-third of Kakao’s total revenue.^[19] Characters such as Ryan, Apeach, and Muzi have grown beyond emoticons into independent brands in their own right.

LINE Stamps

LINE, used primarily in Japan and Southeast Asia, has taken sticker culture even further. The LINE Stamp shop has more than five million stickers registered, with cumulative downloads exceeding 1.7 billion.^[20] LINE generates revenue by collaborating with global brands such as Netflix, Disney, Hello Kitty, and Pokémon to release exclusive stamp sets.

Emoji Keep Evolving

The Unicode Consortium reviews and adds new emoji every year. In 2015, skin-tone modifier emoji were introduced, allowing users to select their preferred skin color. Since then, emoji representing a pregnant person, same-sex couples holding hands, and other increasingly diverse representations of human life have been steadily added.

As of 2022, the Unicode Standard contained more than 3,600 registered emoji. But as the library grows, new problems emerge. The same emoji can look different — and convey different meaning — depending on whether you’re using an Apple, Google, Samsung, or Microsoft device.^[21] Generational gaps in emoji interpretation can also produce genuine miscommunications.

And yet emoji have firmly established themselves as a universal medium of communication that transcends language barriers. In 2015, the Oxford English Dictionary named 😂 (the face with tears of joy) its Word of the Year, formally recognizing emoji as a legitimate form of language.

Conclusion

From the typographic experiments of Puck magazine in 1881, through Scott Fahlman’s :-) in 1982, to Japan’s (^_^) in 1986, Kurita’s pixel emoji in 1999, and Unicode standardization in 2010 — the history of emoticons is ultimately a testament to how powerfully humans want to share emotion with one another.

The Western :-) , the Korean ^^, and the Japanese (^_^) all express the same feeling: a smile. But the way each does so reflects how each language and culture reads a face — and feels an emotion — through text. Within these small differences lies profound cultural depth.

The next time you send someone a message and tap that emoji without a second thought, remember: embedded in that tiny symbol are decades of history and the creativity of countless people.