World Emoji Day: Fun Facts About Emojis

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World Emoji Day is celebrated annually on July 17 because this is the date shown on the calendar emoji on Apple devices

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The day was founded in 2014 by Jeremy Burge, the creator of Emojipedia - a comprehensive resource for everything emoji

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The first set of emojis was created in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita for the Japanese mobile operator NTT DoCoMo

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Emojis became widely popular after Apple included an emoji keyboard in iOS 6 in 2012

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The 'Face with Tears of Joy' emoji was the first pictograph to be named Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year in 2015

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Each year on World Emoji Day, major tech companies like Apple and Google announce updates or new emojis

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In 2017, the Empire State Building was lit in yellow to celebrate World Emoji Day

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By mid-2015, half of all comments on Instagram included at least one emoji, according to Emojipedia

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The most popular emoji on Twitter, with over 2 billion uses, is the 'Face with Tears of Joy'

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The word emoji translates from Japanese to English as "picture character"

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