What Was the First Emoji? The Real Answer, and Why It's Contested 🕵️

Ask who made the first emoji and you'll almost always get one name: Shigetaka Kurita. It's a tidy story, it's on a lot of websites, and it's wrong — or at least, it's only the most famous part of a messier truth. The honest answer depends entirely on what you're willing to count as "an emoji," and once you start pulling that thread, the date keeps moving backwards.

Here's what the research actually shows, in order.

1997: SoftBank's 90 emoji — the earliest named set on a phone

In 2019, Emojipedia published research correcting its own earlier reporting on this. SoftBank — the carrier known at the time as J-Phone — released the SkyWalker DP-211SW on 1 November 1997 with 90 distinct emoji characters built in. That's two full years before the DoCoMo set that usually gets the credit.^[1]

One detail makes this set feel oddly modern: it included the ancestor of the character now encoded in Unicode as U+1F4A9 PILE OF POO 💩. The poo emoji is, in other words, one of the oldest emoji designs still in daily use anywhere on Earth.^[1]

So why did almost nobody notice at the time? Because the DP-211SW didn't sell well, and the emoji weren't supported on any other J-Phone handset. Unless you happened to know other people with that exact phone, the feature was effectively useless — you'd send a symbol and the person on the other end would see nothing meaningful.^[1] A first that nobody could use is easy to forget.

1999: Kurita's 176 icons — famous, and genuinely important

Two years later, Shigetaka Kurita designed the 176-emoji set for NTT DoCoMo's i-mode mobile internet service.^[1] This is the set nearly every "history of emoji" article points at, and while it wasn't first, calling it a footnote would be unfair. It shipped on a platform people actually used, it was designed as a coherent visual system rather than a grab-bag of symbols, and it's the set that made emoji a mainstream expectation on Japanese phones.

Emojipedia's own framing of why the myth stuck is hard to improve on: people love a simple answer to a complex question, and naming one person who "created emoji" is simpler than tracing an evolution across obscure phone models with uncredited designers and engineers.^[1]

Before phones: 1988 and 1990

If you loosen the definition from "emoji on a mobile phone" to "a set of small pictographic characters you can insert into text," the timeline stretches back further still. Research by games developer and blogger Matt Sephton — prompted by a Sharp Zaurus PI-4000 he bought in 2024 — turned up two significantly earlier sets:^[2]

Sephton's reconstructions are pixel-for-pixel recreations built from user manuals and recovered footage of the devices running.^[2] These weren't phones — they were electronic organisers and word processors — which is exactly why the "what counts as an emoji?" question matters so much here.

The word "emoji" is older than every set on this page

This is the part that surprised us most. In July 2026, Emojipedia published findings — again involving Matt Sephton's research — on the age of the word itself.^[3]

• The Oxford English Dictionary records the Japanese term 絵文字 as attested from 1928 or earlier.^[3]
• The earliest confirmed citation with documentation is from 1954, in Kenkyūsha's New Japanese-English Dictionary — a settled dictionary entry 45 years before DoCoMo's i-mode set.^[3]
• A 1988 Toshiba Rupo JW95F word processor manual uses 絵文字 as a column header, labelling the machine's pictographic symbol table.^[3]

The word, in other words, started as a general Japanese term for pictorial symbols and only later narrowed to mean the specific character sets we now insert into messages.^[3] It wasn't coined for phones at all.

So who invented emoji?

Nobody, on their own. That's the genuine answer, and it's more interesting than a single name.

Emoji weren't invented so much as independently reinvented, several times, by different Japanese hardware and telecom companies solving the same small problem: how do you fit tone and meaning into a very short message on a very small screen? Kurita gets the credit because his set was the one that landed on a platform with real users and a real designer to point to. The engineers behind the 1988 Sharp and 1990 NEC sets, and whoever drew SoftBank's 90 characters in 1997, are mostly anonymous.^[1]

If you want the full arc — the carrier incompatibility wars of the 2000s, how Unicode reluctantly took over, and where the standard sits today — that's the subject of our complete history of emojis.

Sources

1. Emojipedia — Correcting the Record on the First Emoji Set.
2. Emojipedia — New Earliest "Emoji" Sets From 1988 & 1990 Uncovered.
3. Emojipedia — The Word "Emoji" Is Older Than You May Think, 16 July 2026.