Understand Millennials with This Emoji Dictionary

Human writing began with pictographs. Perhaps, at some point, a particularly enterprising and enterprising Cro-Magnon man decided to wipe his fingers on the wall of a cave and gave birth to writing. Soon this new form of communication began to evolve along with the creatures who invented it; in Asia and Mesopotamia, animal designs soon developed into logograms and hieroglyphs, and finally into fully realized alphabets.

Language is always evolving; Venerable institutions such as Oxford and the Royal Spanish Academy are constantly updating their dictionaries to include new words and linguistic expressions. But recently the Internet and mobile phone revolution has brought us a funny trend… although some call it a regression: language is returning to symbols. Emoji, popular in Japan in the 1980s, used computer-generated punctuation to express emotions. As computing devices, particularly smartphones, have become more powerful, a more complex set of icons called “Emojis” have emerged.

These are small, colorful images that depict specific objects, emotions, or concepts. Currently, the standard Emoji library (supported by various mobile and desktop operating systems) consists of more than 1,000 different emoji. Some of them are very clear in their meaning, although others can cause confusion. For this reason, we wanted to compile for you a quick dictionary of emojis so that you never have to wonder what they are. millennials they are trying to say.

First, emojis look different depending on the platform you’re using; Since iOS and Android are the most common, we have included images from both platforms. Visit Emojipedia for a complete list of emojis by platform.