Keith Houston

I imagined as much. My commiserations. Birmingham seems to be stuck in a rut it can't get out of.

Is Birmingham still as bad, then? I'm impressed with how Edinburgh has come on, although the very centre of town is still a bit underwhelming.

If you're a cyclist in West Lothian, do yourself a favour and lay your hands on Spokes' excellent cycling map: www.spokes.org.uk/2025/08/spok.... There's a new edition out soon, so the current one is going for a song.

CAE 53's great reads include:
- @royinori.bsky.social on worm hunters in S. Ontario
- @keithhouston.bsky.social on emoji language
- @clearwing3.bsky.social on the history of @theonion.com
- @birdhistory.bsky.social on feather beds of the 1800s

& more!

jodiettenberg.substack.com/p/fifty-three

Hi there - there are no plans so far, but if a Spanish language publisher was to come along I'm sure my agent would be able to make it happen.

“Empire of the Sum” in paperback is my third book this year! 🤯 Read more about it here: shadycharacters.co.uk/books/empire...

I also appreciate that PLATO and Coconet are subjects near to your heart; I have similar interests where I get frustrated if a book or other work omits something that I think is important. But that doesn't make those omissions a "hole" in the story - just an alternative choice.

If there are future editions where I can revise and expand the book, great. If not, I'm still happy with the history that I put together. To my knowledge, PLATO was not a significant influence on emoji history, and Matt Sephton's work puts Japan's emoji earlier than Coconet.

Honestly, there is no script. I wrote the best history of emoji I could in the space I had available. I also needed to cover current usage and potential future developments. I appreciate there are other aspects of emoji history that you're interested in, but the line had to be drawn somewhere.

One more thing, to respond to your original post: the book doesn't say Japan invented emoji. It originated the name and their modern incarnation (c. mid 1980s, if not before), but the book is clear that similar phenomena existed beforehand, even if none of them were as popular or as influential.

On the second sentiment, I would agree with you if i thought that that was what I had done; as it is, I'm happy that I collected a number of obscure historical threads together in a way which I don't think has been done before.

I agree with the first sentiment. Even so, I *did* continue to revise the historical section right up to my deadline. Matt Sephton's discoveries were antedating Japan's history of electronic emoji even as I was writing.

(So much for "lastly"!) There just wasn't room to write about every influence on emoji, so I had to focus on those which other emoji experts have identified as being most relevant. And even then, I didn't have enough pages to devote as much attention to them all as I would have liked.

Lastly, I think I've seen you mention Coconet before, but it was something that came up during my research at all. As such, again, I'm not sure it is broadly considered to have been an influence on the development of emoji.

I'm also unsure how widespread its influence was. Many systems could create facelike symbols, but not all of them were influential enough to be considered emoji predecessors.

Hi Brian - I'm aware of PLATO (I'd love to write about it one day), and I'm aware of the symbols it was possible to create with it, but I don't think they're in a direct line of descent to emoji. (@emojipedia.org might be able to add more detail.)

Hi Bryan - sorry to hear it! What's missing?

The Emoji Tongue - Longreads If 😂 was a word, would that make emoji a language?

Do emoji constitute a language? If so, what are its rules of grammar?

@keithhouston.bsky.social dives into the linguistics of the pictograms that decorate our digital conversations in a new book, excerpted at @longreads.com

longreads.com/2025/07/01/e...

This is fantastic!

Empire of the Sum - 99% Invisible Whether or not you’re a fan of math, we’ve always had a need to count things. Maybe it’s to figure out the maximum weight an airplane can safely hold, or the appropriate amount to tip after a meal,…

Keeping track of numbers has always been part of what makes us human. So at some point along the way, we created a tool to help us keep count, and then we gave that tool a name. We called it: a calculator. 99pi's Lasha Madan has the story

99percentinvisible.org/episode/empi...

Lastly, some credit where it is due: Keith Broni at the mighty https://emojipedia.org/ reviewed the site, and Zach Leat’s 11ty (https://www.11ty.dev/) made it a pleasure to build. Thank you both! #emojipedia #11ty
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The cover of "Face with Tears of Joy" (W. W. Norton, 2025), showing the evolution of the FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY from an emoticon to a shiny, modern 3D-rendered version.

If you want to learn even more about emoji, you can pre-order my book, “Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji” (shadycharacters.co.u...), which will be published next month. Not long now at all!
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The Periodic Table of Emoji, presented by Shady Characters The Periodic Table of Emoji

I really enjoyed making the site. Some programming, some thinking about emoji, some website design; I’m happy with how it came together! If you agree, please share emoji.shadycharacter... here or elsewhere. You can also reply here with your thoughts or leave a comment at shadycharacters.co.u....
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A table showing emoji arranged in rows according to their category, and with the emoji in each row sorted from most positive on the left to most negative on the right.

I have made a thing! Visit emoji.shadycharacter... to see the Shady Characters Periodic Table of Emoji and read about how it came together. There’s a lot of detail in there, although you can read shadycharacters.co.u... to get a shorter intro.
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An Italian manuscript from 1425 using the abbreviation "pco" for "per cento".

Why does the percent sign (%) look the way it does? It’s probably not why you think. Learn more in this post from the Shady Characters archive: shadycharacters.co.u...

(Public domain image from archive.org/stream/r....)

A series of handwritten ampersands and plus signs, overwritten on top of one another.

From the Shady Characters archive: scribbled or scrawled, how do we write ampersands, and is there room for a new ampersand design? Designer Rebecca Kirch dives into the unregulated world of the handwritten "&". shadycharacters.co.u.... (Image courtesy of Rebecca Kirch.)

I saw this! A little concerning.

Read more at shadycharacters.co.u..., listen to the episode at 99percentinvisible.o..., and follow 99PI at @99pi.org.
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If you've enjoyed any of my books, it's a fair bet you'd enjoy “99% Invisible” too. It's a smart and wide-ranging podcast with a focus on design, and this week it looks at emoji in the courts. I tag along to talk to host Roman Mars about the ‘💩’!
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Anyway! Pre-orders are very welcome (the paperback will be published on the 29th of April), and you can find all the details at shadycharacters.co.u....
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