The Emoji Tongue
July 01, 2025 at 03:30PM
Keith Houston | Longreads | July 1, 2025 | 4,374 words (16 minutes)
Excerpted from Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji. Copyright (c) 2025 by Keith Houston. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
In 2015, the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary went all-in on the still-novel phenomenon of emoji. That year, the guardians of the venerable OED named the FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY emoji (😂)—now, as then, the world’s most popular emoji—as Word of the Year, beating out such zingers as “ad blocker,” “Brexit,” “lumbersexual,” “on fleek,” and “sharing economy.” For emoji to be blessed in this way by the OED was remarkable enough, but it also invited a question: if 😂 was a word, did that make emoji a language?
😜 😜 😜
Quoting a would ordinarily be too hackneyed, but it is, perhaps, warranted in this case. The OED, being the largest and oldest dictionary of English, is intimately concerned with the idea of written language, and, moreover, it had the temerity to name an emoji as “word” of the year in the first place. For “language,” then, the OED offers the following:
The method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way.
So: language is human communication. It is spoken or written. It is made up of words, and those words must be combined in a regular, agreed-upon manner.
Emoji satisfy the first clause. At this point in time, two decades or more since emoji came into being, it is not a stretch to claim that we use them to communicate. Equally, it goes without saying that if emoji are to be either a spoken or written language, then they must be a written one. Emoji were born as visual symbols, and, aside from their workmanlike Unicode names, they have no direct verbal equivalents. Finally, can emoji constitute words used “in a structured and conventional way”? This is less clear cut. The rules and conventions that govern written languages are typically described in terms of orthography, which relates to how the language is written and how its words are spelled, and grammar, which describes how words are combined to make comprehensible clauses and sentences. Emoji has neither.
😜 😜 😜
If we try to imagine an emoji orthography, we might say that each emoji should be treated as an individual word whose meaning is given by its name, and whose “spelling” is given by its appearance. But these simplifications have limits. Does PISTOL (🔫) mean “water pistol,” “handgun,” or, in the absence of any other firearm emoji, “gun” in general? Does an old-fashioned PISTOL emoji, drawn to look like a realistic gun, have the same “spelling” as the more usual water pistol (🔫)? Does BILLIARDS, which is drawn as 🎱 on most platforms, represent the game of billiards (which does not, in point of fact, use an 8-ball), or an individual 8-ball, or a generic ball used in the games of billiards, pool, or snooker?
* The irony is that Unicode does now contain separate characters for each of those historical variants of the letter A. They arrived en masse in Unicode 3.1 in the year 2000 to improve support for mathematical expressions.
This issue had already been addressed—or perhaps dodged—at the very dawn of Unicode. In “Unicode 88,” Joe Becker had declared that an individual character should not represent a specific version of a letter or other symbol but only its unifying, underlying concept. In other words, rather than all of the historical variants of “capital A”—roman (A); italic (A), blackletter (𝕬); cursive (𝒜); and others*—Unicode should contain only a single entry for “capital A.” The precise rendering of “capital A” would be left up to each individual typeface that included it. An italic “A” would be italic only because it lived in an italic typeface; a blackletter “A” only because it lived in a blackletter typeface, and so on.
What this means for emoji is that vendors do not have to agree on the appearance of their emoji. In formal terms, a Unicode emoji is nothing more than a name for a symbol and a suggested, but not mandatory, visual representation of that symbol. Vendors can “spell” that symbol however they like. We have already seen that at various times, Apple’s 🔫, Samsung’s 🎌, and Google’s 💛 all looked very different to their peers on other devices, and these are not the only historical disagreements on how to draw a particular emoji. Moreover, orthography also describes how words are arranged relative to one another. Consider, for instance, how we might explain that I, 😡, am squirting you, 😨, with a 🔫. Should that be written from left to right (😡🔫😨), as would be expected in most languages that use the Latin alphabet? Alternatively, should it be from right to left as the direction of the water pistol would suggest (😨🔫😡)? Equally, how can a reader distinguish where this emoji sentence ends and the following one starts? Should we separate emoji sentences with spaces or the 🔚 emoji, or place them on new lines? There are, as yet, no accepted conventions.
😜 😜 😜
The prospect of an emoji grammar is equally perplexing. What are the rules for combining multiple emoji to create meaning? In “😨🔫😡,” can we say for sure that 🔫 is a verb and not a noun? If it is a verb, is it in the present tense, or the future, or the pluperfect? If a German speaker were to write the same expression, would they instead use 😨🔫😡 to match that language’s verb-object word order, which is different from English? Like emoji orthography, these and other questions remain open. Unlike orthography, there are hints that our emoji use is starting to display grammatical qualities.
Starting at the micro level, and with the PISTOL emoji in particular, Jane Solomon, senior emoji lexicographer at Emojipedia, has demonstrated that 🔫 more often points toward other emoji (and often toward a face emoji at that), rather than away from them. Thus, not only does PISTOL have a specific “directionality” (one that is at odds, it turns out, with the left-to-right languages in which it is often used), but also that it is more likely to be a verb than a noun. This is an emoji that actively shoots other emoji, not one that serves merely as a passive picture of a gun.
(Pertinently, the most recent emoji update at the time of writing allows some emoji to be flipped to point in the other direction. PISTOL is not among them, perhaps because Unicode does not want to make it any easier to indicate who is being shot at.)
Elsewhere, researchers Susan C. Herring and Jing Ge found that emoji used on Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging site, seemed to obey certain basic grammatical rules. In their 2020 paper, “Do Emoji Sequences Have a Preferred Word Order?” Herring and Ge translated three hundred sequences of emoji into words. They found that most of the emoji in those sequences could be interpreted as relating to either a subject (“I”), a verb (“love”), or an object (“you”). What is doubly intriguing is that although Mandarin has the same subject-verb-object word order as English (“I love you”), Sina Weibo’s emoji users preferred to use object-verb-subject instead. (“You love I”). The emoji grammar that Herring and Ge had discovered, as simple and as tenuous as it was, differed from that of the language in which it was embedded.
Other research has shown similar results, but Solomon, Herring, Ge, and their peers all hesitate to deem emoji a language. Inasmuch as there are grammatical rules for emoji, the scholarly consensus is that they are implicit, not formal; that they are limited, not exhaustive; and that they are variegated, not universal. Yet this has not discouraged a number of notable attempts to coerce emoji into the shape of a language, scholarly consensus be damned.
😜 😜 😜
The first and most prominent of these endeavors came in September 2009, when Fred Benenson, a philosophy and computer science graduate, launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund an emoji “translation” of Herman Melville’s 1851 opus, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Benenson exceeded his goal of $3,500, raising $3,676 from eighty-three backers, and Emoji Dick; or, 🐳 went to print. As Benenson explained,
Each of the book’s approximately 10,000 sentences has been translated three times by an Amazon Mechanical Turk worker. These results have been voted upon by another set of workers, and the most popular version of each sentence has been selected for inclusion in this book.
As such, Emoji Dick is distinguished as much by its means of production as its emoji-ness: Amazon Mechanical Turk is a service whereby small, manual jobs are doled out to a pool of human workers and the results are sent back to the computer for processing. It is the exact opposite of the conventional model of human-computer interaction. Practically speaking, Benenson’s use of Amazon Mechanical Turk resulted in Moby Dick’s famous opening line— “Call me Ishmael”—being translated as “☎︎👱♂️👌⛵️🐳.” As if acknowledging the decidedly impressionistic quality of the translation, each of Emoji Dick’s lines of emoji was accompanied by the original text. The first few lines read as follows:
☎︎👱♂️👌⛵️🐳.
Call me Ishmael.
🎰🈁🚤
Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.
5️⃣❌👃💹💪🏼🌻
It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.
A research paper published some years later asked a pertinent question of Emoji Dick: “How would this emoji sequence be translated back into English?” and then furnished an answer: “If one does not know Moby Dick (by heart), one will not be able to answer this question.”
Notwithstanding the variable quality and one-way nature of its translation, Emoji Dick went on to be the first book in the collections of the U.S. Library of Congress to credit Amazon Mechanical Turk as an author.16 And Benenson’s success, if not his means of translation, inspired others to attempt their own emoji editions of classic works. In 2015, for example, a designer named Joe Hale translated both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Peter Pan into emoji.
Emoji Dick moved Becca Rothfeld, a writer at art website Hyperallergic, to ask “Are Emojis a Language?” Sadly, like all things, emoji obey Betteridge’s law of headlines: “If a question is asked in a headline, the answer is no.” Despite Benenson and Hale’s best efforts in producing their respective emoji tomes, and despite Hale’s optimistic claim that he could “reverse translate” his emojified Alice into an approximation of the original, emoji still lack the broadly agreed rules and customs of true languages. We have not yet arrived at a “structured and conventional way” to use emoji—but maybe one day we will.
😜 😜 😜
In the press release that announced 😂 as Word of the Year, Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Dictionaries, commented:
You can see how traditional alphabet scripts have been struggling to meet the rapid-fire, visually focused demands of 21st Century communication. It’s not surprising that a pictographic script like emoji has stepped in to fill those gaps—it’s flexible, immediate, and infuses tone beautifully.
Grathwohl uses a term here that offers a different lens on emoji. If they are not yet a language in and of themselves, could emoji be seen as the written expression of a spoken language? Could emoji be a script?
At first glance, it is tempting to file emoji alongside writing systems such as cuneiform, hieroglyphics, or Chinese characters, all of which started life as pictures of objects. After all, that is how emoji got started. But merely existing as a collection of images is not enough for emoji to be called a script, since all of those other examples served as visual representations of spoken languages (Akkadian, Old Egyptian, and Old Chinese respectively), while emoji are still unmoored from any spoken equivalents. You may choose to read aloud the emoji in a message you receive (“Love you lots, kissing face emoji, heart emoji, hugging face emoji”), but all you are doing is describing a set of pictures. They no more form part of the written grammar of that text than would a picture of the Eiffel Tower.
That said, some have successfully expanded beyond their native tongues. The Latin alphabet, for example, is now used for hundreds of languages worldwide. Some of those, such as the Romance languages, are derived from spoken Latin and brought the alphabet along with them; others, such as Turkish, have had the Latin alphabet retroactively applied. Likewise, and not without controversy, Chinese characters have since branched out into Japan and Korea. As such, it is just about possible to imagine that emoji, despite their wordless origins, could achieve scripthood by being retroactively applied to Japanese, English, or any other spoken language, in the same way as those other scripts in the past. It is not difficult to imagine that 😊 could translate to “smile,” or that 🚗 might mean “car.”
Emoji resembles the Latin alphabet in another way too. Just as the same sequence of letters can mean different things in different languages, some emoji mean different things in different cultural contexts. In Japan, for instance, 🙏 means “thank you” and not “praying” or “high five” as it does in other places. The Japanese words for “poo” and “luck” sound similar, and so 💩 has connotations of serendipity that do not travel well. And ♨️ is not a symbol for a plate of hot food but instead a cartographic symbol for onsen, or hot springs. Mismatched meanings are not confined to Japan: In some countries, the insouciant 💅 has distinctly sexual connotations. Equally, the thumbs-up emoji (👍) is seen as a rude gesture in some places, with the same going for the “OK” hand gesture (👌), which can mean “nothing” or “zero.” In other contexts, 👌 can be a white-supremacist symbol, and in yet others it represents an orifice into which a 👍 might be inserted.
Even where an emoji has broadly the same meaning across different cultures, seemingly inconsequential details can have a disproportionate effect on its perceived meaning. In China, for instance, the lack of expression around the eyes of many common smileys, such as 🙂, gives them a dismissive or mocking air, whereas the more expressive eyes of 😁 and 😄 are less ambiguous.
In these respects, emoji are as chameleonic as any other common script. Yet there is one crucial characteristic shared by many scripts (and alphabets in particular) that emoji do not yet possess. In linguistic terms, emoji are not symbolic.
Historically, scripts have tended to evolve. Cuneiform became syllabic, repurposing its logograms, or word symbols, as sounds. Egyptian hieroglyphics gave rise to a number of true alphabets, Latin included, through a tortuous procession of descendants. In the process, these scripts shed their ties to physical objects and actions, so that the objects their glyphs once depicted have little or no bearing on their current meaning: the characters in a script are abstract symbols, not descriptive icons.
* The Phoenician alphabet was technically an abjad, which means it had no vowels. “O” was a later addition.
As an example, this means that our letter “D,” which descended from the Phoenician “𐤃,” representing a door, has no connection to actual doors. And our “G,” from the Phoenician “𐤂,” originally a camel, is plainly not a camel any longer. “D” and “G” are thus symbols, not pictures. Throw in the letter “O,”* and we can make the word “DOG” (without any pictorial connections to an actual dog), or we can rearrange those letters to make “GOD” (ditto), which is a very different concept. For a script to be symbolic means it is a flexible, expressive means of communication—and it is why we can express the entirety of the spoken English language using just twenty-six basic letters.
This, finally, is where the idea of emoji as a script runs aground. An individual emoji may have many different interpretations, but, with few exceptions, those interpretations are closely tied to the object that the emoji depicts. 🐕 is a picture of a dog, inherently bound to the idea of dogness, or dogs, or, in some cases, the sound of the word “dog” in the reader’s language. Thus, emoji are iconic rather than symbolic, like all those early pictographic scripts, meaning that they represent only their pictured object or activity—no more, and no less. We cannot accurately translate spoken English or Japanese or Korean into or out of emoji any more than if we were to use traffic signs or geometric shapes. There is no emoji alphabet or syllabary with which to construct arbitrary words or sentences, nor is there one in sight.
😜 😜 😜
Strike one: emoji are not a language. Strike two: emoji are not a script. Yet emoji’s lack of coherence, structure, or even an especially well-defined purpose has not stopped them from suffusing every corner of online communication. Perhaps there need not be a strike three.
The Tokyo Olympics of 1964 pioneered the use of wayfinding pictograms. A decade later, and partly inspired by those pictograms, the American Institute of Graphic Arts created a similar collection of icons for use by the U.S. Department of Transportation in airports and other travel hubs. Forty-five years later, the DOT’s icons are still in use; they have been enshrined in their own ISO standard. It turns out that a picture of a person, action, or thing is too effective a means of communication to be dismissed out of hand, regardless of whether it forms part of a language or a script.
Inasmuch as emoji are most accurately described as pictures of things, they are part of this lineage of icons. Yet there is an important difference between emoji and other, similar symbols, and it stems from emoji’s special ability to be used with regular text. The DOT’s airport iconography and the graphical signposts of the Tokyo Olympics live, or lived, in a deliberately wordless context, relying on their iconicity to transcend the languages of their countries of origin. Emoji, on the other hand, are often used to enhance written language in unexpected and creative ways.
Consider Cher. Tyler Schnoebelen, a linguist and data scientist, has noted that the pop star not only uses emoji more frequently than the average Twitter user but also that she employs them in a variety of formal linguistic roles. Schnoebelen singles out the following tweet, posted in April 2017, which conveys Cher’s contempt for the newly inaugurated U.S. president, Donald Trump:
🚽S SUCH A🔥IDIOT‼️HES MEANT 2
GIVE US STRENGTH,HOPE,OPTIMISM.
HES MEANT 2🐝CALM,STRONG,
HONEST,LEADER,INSTEAD OF
SELF‑AGGRANDIZING,LYING,DOLT🤡
There is a lot going on here.
Perhaps the most striking emoji here is 🐝, which Cher uses not for the meaning of “bee,” “insect,” “sting,” or any other concept related to bees but for the sound of the word “bee.” This is called a rebus, and, handily, its application to emoji had been explained earlier the same year by Philip Sergeant, a lecturer in applied linguistics at the Open University. In a post at Strong Language, a blog focused on the linguistics of profanity, Sergeant mused on potential emoji translations of insults slung at then-presidential candidate Donald Trump during a 2016 visit to Scotland. On the word “wanker,” Sergeant wrote:
👐⚓️ [ . . . ] is a rebus: a linguistic device which uses pictures to represent part or all of a word. Here, the “w” indicated by the conjoined hands is appended to “anchor” to approximate the pronunciation of the English word.
Sergeant also unpacked the term “cockwomble”:*
🐓🐹; is a calque: a word that’s borrowed from another language through direct translation. In this case the two component parts of the English word are rendered with the icons that individually represent them (although with a bit of poetic licence being taken in the substitution of the “hamster face” for a womble).
* Wombles are fictional, furry creatures created by the children’s author Elisabeth Beresford. They are known to British Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers through a TV series of the same name.
Thus emoji both play up to and step outside their origins as wordless icons: You can use 👐 in its usual role to mean “jazz hands” or “hug,” or you can hope that your reader will interpret it as the letter “w.” You can use 🐓 to mean “a male chicken,” or you can use it as a substitute for the sound of the word “cock”; likewise, ⚓️ can represent the concept of an anchor, or it can convey merely the sound of the word “anchor.” (This doubling-up of signs to mean both the thing they represent and the sound of that thing’s name is exactly what enabled scripts such as cuneiform to evolve from ideographic toward syllabic. It is tempting to imagine that emoji, too, might one day become a true script through a similar mechanism.)
Cher’s tweet contained not only an emoji rebus—which, it bears mentioning, is not an especially common way to use emoji—but also a calque (🔥 for “flaming”); a metaphor, in the form of 🚽 as a shorthand for “Donald Trump”; and, finally, a terminating 🤡 as a sort of semantically rich period to make absolutely clear her opinion of 🚽. As Schnoebelen writes, “It is universally recognized by experts that Cher is the Queen of Emoji. (Hail, Cher.)”
Outside Twitter’s confines, the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year contest highlights yet more examples of emoji puns and metaphors. FAX MACHINE (📠) can be used to mean “facts”; 🐐 can pass for “GOAT,” or “greatest of all time”; and “im🍑” means “impeach,” referring to the first of President Donald Trump’s two impeachments. 💀 means death, but only in the sense of dying with laughter; 🫠 does not mean to literally melt, but to feel acute embarrassment; and 🚩 is more often used to call out toxic behavior than to refer to an actual red flag. It may not be surprising to learn that a 2022 survey of emoji users found that a majority used them contrary to their “face values.”
Emoji wordplay can span multiple languages. In 2018, Chinese supporters of the “#metoo” movement against sexual assault and harassment were faced with the closure of the 180,000-strong “Feminist Voices” account on the Sina Weibo microblogging site for alleged breaches of the platform’s rules. The #MeToo hashtag, too, was censored by Weibo, closing another avenue for activists to communicate. But supporters found a creative way around the block: they began using the hashtag “#RiceBunny,” and sometimes the emoji for those same words: 🍚🐰. Spoken aloud, the Mandarin words for “rice bunny” sound like mˇı tù, and therefore hint at the English phrase “me too.”
😜 😜 😜
Emoji’s interplay with written language does not stop at word replacement, and emoji are increasingly used as alternatives to other parts of written language. Cher’s clown-emoji-as-period is one example: here, the 🤡 is acting as a mark of punctuation, replacing a period or exclamation point while at the same time conveying more emotion than either. As catalogued by Jane Solomon, Emojipedia’s lexicographer in residence, Cher often uses other emoji in the same way, favoring that odd subset of emoji that represent conventional marks of punctuation redrawn in an emojified register—chiefly❗️, ‼️, ⁉️,❓, but also the more esoteric HEAVY HEART EXCLAMATION MARK ORNAMENT (❣️). Solomon also calls out other emoji that are at home at the end of a sentence: 💋 or 😘 to sign off with a kiss; 🤔 to convey skepticism or a questioning tone; 🙃 for almost anything, with usage ranging from “awkward sadness” to silliness and irony. Other times, emoji stand in for other marks of punctuation or even typographic styles such as bold and italic. Witness the so-called ratchet clap, in which the CLAPPING HANDS SIGN is used to 👏 really 👏 truly 👏 thunderously 👏 emphasize 👏 words 👏 in 👏 a 👏 sentence 👏. This is emoji as a sort of aggressive word space, yanking that eighth-century invention of Celtic monks firmly into the age of the smartphone. Or consider the exceptionally clever ✌️air quotes✌️ first attributed to The Atlantic writer Jemele Hill, or even the more general use of emoji to add semantic guard rails around ⚠️warnings⚠️, 🚨emergencies🚨, ✨fawning admiration✨, or 🌹declarations of love🌹.
😜 😜 😜
An emoji skeptic might take in emoji’s many-splendored entanglements with the written word and wonder: do they matter? Any writer with a heart in their chest should be able to tell their correspondent they are loved, so why belabor the point with needless visual 🌹emphasis🌹 or trite blowing of kisses? Is a question asked with a 🤔 functionally different from one asked with a question mark? If one’s point is not already forceful enough, 👏 can 👏 it 👏 be 👏 saved 👏 by 👏 a 👏 ratchet 👏 clap 👏?
Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne, a pair of linguists who specialize in online language and gestures respectively, offered an answer. In a 2019 paper entitled “Emoji as Digital Gestures,” McCulloch and Gawne make a convincing case that emoji act as the body language of the web. Citing earlier studies that demonstrated that a majority of emoji are used to augment the meaning of the words they accompany, McCulloch and Gawne show how emoji in all of the roles above—metaphors and other figures of speech; punctuation; “formatting”; and plain old pictures—give us an extra channel of information that allow us to emphasize, reinforce, and sometimes even subvert our written meanings. If our skeptic needs a reason to care about emoji, this is it: emoji are valuable partners for our writing, adding literal and metaphorical color to staid old letters and numbers and punctuation and occasionally, in creative and delightful ways, replacing them entirely.
Emoji are not a language, that much is clear. They are something more intriguing and more disruptive than that—they are insurgents within language, a colorful and symbiotic virus whose symptoms we have only haltingly understood.
Excerpted from Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji. Copyright (c) 2025 by Keith Houston. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
Keith Houston is the author of Face with Tears of Joy, Empire of the Sum, Shady Characters, and The Book. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and on Mental Floss, BBC Culture, and Literary Hub. He lives in Linlithgow, Scotland.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/07/01/emoji-language-keith-houston/
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