Emojis expert tells all: Characters and their alternative meanings

If an aubergine, peach, gun, bomb or poo were submitted to become emojis in this day and age, it is unlikely they would be accepted, Emojipedia's founder says.

Jeremy Burge has been called the "Samuel Johnson of emoji". Ten years ago he founded Emojipedia, an online reference site of emoji characters and their meaning. He was also a member of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, which is responsible for reviewing requests for new emoji.

He currently writes a Mobile Tech Journal and has a popular TikTok channel about living on a narrow boat. 

Burge - who founded the online reference site of emoji characters and their meaning about 10 years ago - says aubergine, peach, gun, bomb or poo would be rejected because most tech companies would not have embraced having them on its phones.

"They all came from Japan and mostly they were the work of one or two people over there who just wanted to put it on a specific phone, before committees and everyone else got in the way of all the fun."

Burge spoke to Kim Hill on Saturday Morning, talking about how the picture characters first appeared on phones in Japan at the turn of the millennium, but now span more than 3000 characters used to capture emotions within written text.

Burge was also once a member of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, which is responsible for reviewing requests for new emojis.

Emojis needed to accepted by the committee in a technical sense, he said.

"The reason that emojis are popular today is that they do work on every phone and that wasn't always the case.

"In Japan, sometimes you'd send a sushi and someone else would get a smiley face on the other end. They didn't have a committee and every phone company's emojis worked differently, so there is a very specific reason why that committee needs to exist, but as I say, it does take some of the fun out of it sometimes."

Alternative meanings for emojis

For many people using emojis, some are used in a different context than they were created for.

One of those emojis is the aubergine - or eggplant - which is often sexualised.

Burge said the peach emoji was also used in a similar matter "for people's behind".

"That really took off on Twitter. And then the aubergine, I think it may have been the same sort of circumstance that it wasn't intended like that in Japan."

Burge said some other emojis, such as a slightly smiling face, may be an innocent smiling face to some, but something else to the younger generation who may use it to illustrate "smiling through the pain".

He suggested people looking for a genuine smiling face to use one of the emojis that had blushing cheeks so it could not be misinterpreted as an unhappy emoji.

The skull emoji is now considered the new laughing emoji with people sending it as if to say "I'm dead. You've killed me with laughter, I've laughed so much I have died", Burge said.

When Hill seemed surprised to learn this, Burge said: "Absolutely, that is 100 percent, and it's becoming quite mainstream now."

While still looking after Emojipedia, which he has since sold, Burge noticed the emoji creeping up in the popular stats and did some research to discover what it is now being used for.

Submitting to the committee

As Burge said, every emoji these days has to be submitted with full documentation to the committee to be approved.

Emojis need to have multiple uses in order to be approved, he said.

For example, the recently added melting face was submitted by its co-authors suggesting it was "sort-of ambiguous" as it was smiling as it melted, although it could also be used to signify someone finding something a bit amusing - but not completely.

The co-authors also suggested it could signify climate change in that a person was "so hot" they were "melting away".

Emoji controversies

While on the committee, Burge said some of the trickiest emojis to deal with included geopolitical flags.

Flags are "controversial in general", Burge said and he often got grief from people of countries that did not have an emoji of their flag - or people who disagreed with the flag that was being used to represent their country.

"Other complications included brands trying to get their way into emojis. You're not meant to have any real branded emoji, you know if you look at the set, there's no particular brand on any of these cars or the devices that are on there ... that was always a complicated matter, too."

Representation of people was an issue, as well.

"That is a challenge which people [would] say to me 'why can't I have brown hair but white skin? Why is it white skin or dark hair or black hair' or you have red-haired people in their own section and it's just a numbers game.

"No matter how many times you do it, you're going to miss out somebody, you're going to miss out a hairstyle or a hair colour, and I think a few years ago perhaps the committee realised this was a never-ending challenge and has almost opted out of it."