Emoji Timeline: The Evolution of Emojis from 1988 to 2026 🗓️
Most emoji histories are essays. This one is a reference. Below is every emoji release we can date from primary sources, in order, with the exact day it shipped — because "emoji were invented in 1999" is the kind of tidy sentence that hides about a decade of prior art and fifteen years of versioning.
Era one: the pictograph years, 1988–1999
Before emoji were a standard, they were a hardware feature — a small grid of symbols baked into a specific device, usable only by people who owned the same model.
That last distinction is contested often enough that we gave it its own page: what was the first emoji, and why the answer keeps moving.
Era two: 11 October 2010, when emoji became a standard
The turning point in the timeline is 11 October 2010. That is the date attached to emoji version 0.6 in Unicode's own emoji specification, UTS #51, and it corresponds to Unicode 6.0.[3] From that point on, an emoji was no longer a picture your carrier drew — it was a codepoint every vendor agreed to render.
Why that mattered mechanically, and why the same codepoint still looks different on an iPhone and a Pixel, is the subject of our guide to how Unicode makes emoji work everywhere.
Era three: every emoji version and its release date
Seventeen dated emoji releases sit between 2010 and 2025. These dates come from the Modifications section of UTS #51, the specification Unicode maintains for emoji itself.[3]
Two patterns fall straight out of that list. The early years were erratic — two releases in 2015, two in 2016, then nothing at all in 2013. And since Emoji 14.0, the cycle has locked: 14 September 2021, 13 September 2022, 12 September 2023, 10 September 2024, 9 September 2025. Five consecutive September releases, each a day or two earlier in the month than the last.[3]
The gap in the numbers: why 5.0 is followed by 11.0
If you scan the list you'll notice emoji versions 6 through 10 don't exist. This is the single most confusing thing about the emoji timeline, and the explanation is in the specification itself. UTS #51 states that starting with version 11.0, the repertoire of emoji characters is synchronized with the Unicode Standard and uses the same version numbering system.[3]
Emoji 5.0 shipped alongside Unicode 10.0. Rather than let the two numbers drift further apart, the next emoji release skipped ahead to 11.0 to match Unicode 11.0 — and they have moved in lockstep ever since. So an "Emoji 8.0" was never cancelled or withdrawn. It simply never existed.
Where the timeline stands today
Emoji 17.0, released 9 September 2025, is the current version. It added 7 new emoji codepoints — Distorted Face, Fight Cloud, Orca, Hairy Creature, Trombone, Landslide and Treasure Chest — bringing the total number of Unicode-recommended emoji to 3,953.[4]
The next entry is already drafted. Unicode publishes the following batch as a beta chart, Emoji Recently Added, v18.0β, listing nine emoji: Cracking Face, Leftwards Thumb Sign, Rightwards Thumb Sign, Monarch Butterfly, Pickle, Lighthouse, Meteor, Eraser and Net with Handle.[5] Counting the ten additional two-skin-tone modifier variants, that is 19 provisional candidates, expected to be approved in September 2026 and to take the total to 3,972.[6]
Nothing on that beta chart is final until approval. We keep the full breakdown, with what changed between drafts, on our Emoji 17.0 and 18.0 guide.
💬 EmojiCircle's Take
Laid out end to end, the emoji timeline is really a story about governance. The first eleven years were
companies building incompatible symbol sets; the last fifteen have been a committee shipping a dated release
every September, with the batch sizes shrinking as the obvious gaps get filled. It's less romantic than the
one-inventor version — and far easier to verify.
Want to see what the current standard actually contains?
Search our emoji catalog
and copy anything you like.
Sources
- Emojipedia — Correcting the Record on the First Emoji Set.
- Emojipedia — New Earliest "Emoji" Sets From 1988 & 1990 Uncovered.
- Unicode — UTS #51: Unicode Emoji, Modifications section (document version 17.0, 4 September 2025).
- Emojipedia — What's New In Unicode 17.0.
- Unicode — Emoji Recently Added, v18.0β.
- Emojipedia — Draft Emoji List for 2026/2027.
Explore More Emojis
Read the narrative version in our complete history of emojis, settle the origin argument with what was the first emoji, or find out how Unicode makes emoji work across every device. You can also check when new emojis reach your phone, browse the current standard with our emoji search engine, or dig into Smileys and Objects.