How emojis have changed meaning over time

A cup of tea, or share the gossip? What do you mean when you send an emoji?

Well, a new study, carried out by Alexander Robertson and his team of researchers at the University of Edinburgh, has been looking into how the meaning behind emojis has changed over time.

"People tend to have very different opinions about emoji. They either think emoji are silly, or they think emoji might one day replace languages like English. So we were interested in finding out how similar emoji are to written language," said Alexander.

"One way of doing this it to look for things emoji and language have in common. We know that the meaning of words can change over time (for example, "lit" can mean something very different today compared to years ago), so we looked at emoji to see if they had changing meanings too."

How did they carry out their research?

As part of their research, Alex and his team combed through around 1.7 billion tweets (published between 2012 and 2018) to check for emojis.

The researchers then took a closer look at the tweets to see which words were used alongside the emojis, to allow them to understand how the emojis were being used, and what the meanings behind them were.

"If an emoji always appears in the same context then we can say its meaning doesn't change much. But if it changes over time, then the meaning of that emoji is probably changing too," said Alexander.

Which emoji do you like to use the most?

What did they find?

The team found patterns in the way emojis were used, in the same way that words changed meaning over time.

"For example, in 2012 the snake emoji 🐍 was used with words like "animal" and "venom" but a few years later it was used more with words like "hater", "fake" and "bully". It stopped being used to refer to snakes and more to describe people and how they behave," said Alexander.

Of the emojis studied, the four emojis that changed the most were fingers pointing left, right and down, and a fist bump.

One surprising finding that Alex and his team discovered was that some emojis changed their meaning at different times of the year, ever year: "So from January to September 🌲 just means "tree" but for the rest of the year it is used to talk about Christmas, even though there is already a Christmas tree emoji! 🎄" said Alexander.

We asked him if he thought that emoji meanings would continue to change in the future. He replied: "Definitely! We can use computers and lots of data to see when emoji have already changed their meaning, but the difficult part is finding out why they change. One explanation is that younger people are more creative with language and emoji, so to really understand why emoji change researchers will need to get answers from young people."

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