VIDEO: World Emoji Day

(WCBI) – They’ve become as common as punctuation.

If you text a friend, chances are you have used an emoji.

Emojis have been around for almost twenty years.

Emotion can sometimes be hard to interpret if it isn’t clearly stated, whether it’s a letter, email, or text.

Emojis slide that emotion into a text.

With emojis, conversations are a little more fun, and everyone has their favorite.

The laughing one, the crying one, the shock one, all are emojis, the Japanese word that literally means “picture message”

These little symbols have changed the way we communicate with each other, and since 2014 July 17th has been known as World Emoji Day, to celebrate them.

“You know, so much of our communication is non-verbal. it’s seeing the person react; it’s seeing the look on their face. And you don’t really have that with text messaging, so you can imagine how hard it is to do within a short amount of time. Whereas, the emoji can help give a lot of information, give a lot of those non-verbals in a very short amount of time,” said Michael Nadorff, Psychology Professor at Mississippi State.

You don’t have to think very hard to determine what the other person is thinking.

“So someone can very quickly tell is this serious or is this sarcastic just by one character,” continued Nadorff.

They can even take the place of words altogether and add some life to a conversation.

“Every time I’m in a conversation with my friends, we say a joke. Instead of being silly and say ‘hahaha’ in the thing, I just use the emoji,” said Columbus teenager, Kayla Spann.

It’s even to the point where a conversation without them seems out of date.

“To me, when they don’t use emojis, it kind of makes the conversation boring, and the emoji makes it more fun,” said Jeremiah Harris, another Columbus teen.

From the way keyboards are updating and adding more emojis every year, it seems that they will continue to be a part of our everyday conversations, keeping emotions clear and everyone on the same page.

“Having something that helps us understand the emotions behind those words is very important because otherwise the same words can mean many different things,” said Nadorff.

Emojis are even about to move from our phone screen to the big screen with the Emoji movie coming out at the end of July.

So why July 17th as the date for this holiday?

Well, if you look in your emoji text box and scroll over to the calendar emoji, you can see the permanent date on that emoji is July 17th.