1Open the emoji keyboard on an iPhone and find the calendar. What date do you see? It says July 17. That is why World Emoji Day is on July 17. A man named Jeremy Burge started the day in 2014. He made Emojipedia, a website about the meaning of every emoji. In 2016, Google changed its calendar emoji to July 17, too.

2The word emoji comes from Japanese. E means picture, and moji means letter. Many people think it comes from the English word emotion, but that is not true. The two words just sound similar. Words like karaoke and tsunami also came from Japanese.

3In the 1990s, young people in Japan loved a little heart on their pagers. In 1999, a Japanese phone company started a service for the internet on phones. A young worker, Shigetaka Kurita, and his team made 176 emoji for it. Each picture was only 12 dots wide and 12 dots high. He got ideas from manga, weather maps, and street signs. In 2016, a famous art museum in New York added these emoji to its collection.

4Today, there are more than 3,900 emoji. In 2018, people used 700 million of them on Facebook every day. In 2015, a famous dictionary even chose the crying-with-laughter face as its word of the year. So on July 17, try writing a message with only emoji. Can your friends understand it?