World Emoji Day 2027 is on Saturday

About World Emoji Day

Emoji started on Japanese mobile phones in the late 1990s and are now part of the Unicode Standard, which lets the same characters show up across different devices and apps. World Emoji Day is a playful occasion to talk about how people use them, how designs differ between platforms and which new ones are on the way. Tech companies have used the date to preview upcoming emoji designs, and it has also been marked offline: in 2017 New York's Empire State Building was lit in emoji yellow.

Jeremy Burge, who founded the emoji reference site Emojipedia, came up with the day in 2014. He announced it on July 11 that year, less than a week before the first World Emoji Day on July 17, with no formal plans beyond picking the date. He chose July 17 because it was the date shown on Apple's calendar emoji. Apple had used that date as a small in-joke: it is the day in 2002 when the company announced its iCal calendar app at Macworld Expo.

For years, other platforms' calendar emoji showed different dates, which caused some confusion about when the day fell. Many designers later switched to July 17 to match it, and by 2020 Emojipedia reported that nearly every major platform displayed that date, with Twitter among the last to change.

Sources: World Emoji Day: FAQ, Emojipedia: July 17 is World Emoji Day Everywhere Now (2020). How we check dates.

How to mark World Emoji Day

• Hold a conversation with a friend using only emoji and see how much of the meaning survives.
• Look up the official name of an emoji you use often; some are not what you would guess.
• Compare how one emoji looks on different phones and apps, and notice how design changes the tone of a message.
• Have students retell a short story or poem in emoji and ask classmates to decode it.
• Learn how screen readers announce emoji, and keep your posts accessible by not stringing too many together.

World Emoji Day dates