Here's Why There Are So Many Useless Emojis On Your Phone

Let's be honest, most texters probably use the super smiley face and poop emoji more than any other on the keyboard. As fun as it can be to write entire messages in swirls, tacos, and cats ,there are a few of those quirky emoticons most people's fingers have never even touched. They seem utterly useless, so why are they on your phone in the first place?

Huffington Post explains, "emoji history" is rooted all the way back to the earliest version of cell phones in Japan.

In 1999, Shigetaka Kurita invented the emoji described as a "small digital image or icon used to express an idea, emotion, etc., in electronic communication." The word emoji is derived from Japanes with 'e' meaning 'picture' + moji' meaning letter or character, according to Ignition.

Kurita was involved in the launch of the world's first mobile internet platform, which at the time was called "i-mode." As Ignition explains, "the goal of the i-mode service was to provide internet service on 'feature phones,'" which were widely used in Japan at that time. "A feature phone in 1999 had a very small monochrome LCD screen which could only fit in 48 letters."

Kurita said prior to i-mode, AT&T offered information services to users, however everything was written in text. He was used to pictures rather than texts, to deliver information - citing weather reports in Japan used symbols rather than text.

So while smiling faces, cars, and suns were created, so were a number of characters to signify longer messages.

The purple square with the character 空 means "empty" while the turquoise and yellow chevron symbol, which is pointing downwards, represents beginning driver in Japan.

"The original project was headed by Google and was set up to bring all of the emojis from Japan into the Unicode Standard," said Burge. "The process of standardizing emojis in Unicode didn't really look at the expected popularity of these characters," he added.

"The goal of bringing emojis into Unicode was to support all of the emoji character sets from Japan for better compatibility with the wider world. The emojis in Japan included plenty of Asian-centric images, and these were all included as part of the standardization project," Burge said.

Lo and behold, a ton of emojis most may not use. However, HP points out there are a few of the first emojis that are still used in Japan today, like the purple "empty" emoji, which translates in both Japanese and Chinese.