What do emojis mean? How millennials and Gen-Z use them very differently

In the beginning, they were just a few keyboard characters at the end of your sentences, added to convey emotion or look “cool”. But when emoticons graduated from simple characters to well-expressed emojis, they spurred a universal language of their own.

For the uninitiated, emoticons are textual portrayals of faces and emotions represented by keyboard characters such as punctuation marks, letters and numbers. Emojis, on the other hand, are the little pictorial icons we all know and love today.

It was 2009 when several engineers from Apple submitted an official proposal to adopt 625 new emoji characters into the Unicode standards, with the decision of making emojis accessible from 2010. Suddenly, they were on phones, social media platforms and emails everywhere.

Young people did not waste any time incorporating them into their messaging habits. A text without an emoji nowadays might make you seem “dull”, “rude” or too “serious”. Use a thumbs up or a smiley face, however, and you’ll have injected a spot of positivity and enthusiasm into your note.

"When I encounter someone who doesn't use emojis, I immediately sense they are either significantly older than me, or it is work and I have to be extremely professional," says Asma Nur, a Gen-Z public relations specialist in the UAE.

“It makes me uneasy either way. We use them to express our thoughts and feelings without words. With emojis, you can communicate so many things by using one or two icons, cutting down the time you need to type it out. It's time-efficient and conveys emotion easily. It also makes for interesting ways of expressing oneself.”

All of this has made face-to-face or phone conversations a rarer form of communication among young adults. Those in