Twenty years ago, Microsoft’s instant messaging platform added a new feature: dozens of little icons users could drop into their messages, conveying happiness, surprise, confusion, or a sheep. Gradually, then all at once, emojis were here: spreading from chat platforms to SMS, email, social media, and—to the chagrin of legions of teachers—even infecting school assignments.

For years, I was an emoji hold-out. Embracing the little, cartoonish images felt like transgressing against the virtue of words. To my linguistically traditional soul, raised on Jane Austen and Isaac Babel, emojis seemed cheap and unnecessarily revealing. I resented their creep into written communication, which had long managed just fine, thank you very much, with the alphabet.

But just a few years ago, after befriending a colleague whose texts were flecked with these symbols, I had a change of heart. Our daily banter thrived on the emotional zest that emojis added, and on the sense of connection they fueled. Timidly at first, I started to thread them into my digital discourse. Now they’re woven into my communication with many people in my life, punctuating a short note or standing alone as a single message, a 💥 or 🔥 or 🌟 as a full-stop reply. What’s surprised me most is the palpable joy these flutters of icon-based interaction have added to routine exchanges.

The effect is like a shot of meaning-making caffeine—pure emotional charge.

Valeria Pfeifer is a cognitive scientist at the University of Arizona. She is one of a small group of researchers who has studied how emojis affect our thinking. She tells me that my newfound joy makes sense. Emojis “convey this additional complex layer of meaning that words just don’t really seem to get at,” she says. Many a word nerd has fretted that emojis are making us—and our communication—dumber. But Pfeifer and other cognitive scientists and linguists are beginning to explain what makes them special.

In a book called The Emoji Code, British cognitive linguist Vyvyan Evans describes emojis as “incontrovertibly the world’s first truly universal communication.” That might seem like a tall claim for an ever-expanding set of symbols whose meanings can be fickle. But language evolves, and these ideograms have become the lingua franca of digital communication.

The story of the emoji reaches back further than early instant messaging programs. Before these graphically detailed icons were easy to display, the clunkier, character-constructed emoticon held their place.

Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Scott Fahlman is often credited with codifying these smile-and-wink punctuation constructions. After watching posters in early online bulletin boards get into skirmishes—say, when a poster’s sarcasm was misread—he suggested in 1982 that colleagues add a “:-)” or “:-(” to indicate their tone. If posters could flag when they were being funny or sarcastic, he figured, readers wouldn’t be so easily upset.

Writers and thinkers had, for decades, proposed subbing in punctuation for feelings, though many, it seems, did so in tongue-in-cheek jest. Other early potential emoticons in the wild—such as a “;)” in a transcript note describing audience reactions of “applause and laughter” during an 1862 speech by Abraham Lincoln—were likely typesetting errors or examples of looser punctuation norms of the day.

The interface of language and emotion is where the magic lies.

None of these uses took root though until the fertile conditions of the early internet arrived. And as graphical interfaces improved, the contemporary emoji was born.

The emoji didn’t initially set out to be a souped-up emoticon. When, in 1999, Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita developed a first suite of 176 of them for the cell phone company he was working for, most weren’t meant to convey a feeling at all. The majority of them were quotidian symbols he envisioned people would toss in occasionally in place of words: a house, an ear, a tennis racket, a fax sign.

It wasn’t until 2011, when Apple first made emojis accessible through a dedicated emoji keyboard on their mobile devices (and Android did the same two years later) that emojis truly started going mainstream. By 2015, more than 90 percent of internet users had deployed them, and the Oxford English Dictionary named 😂 Word of the Year. Today, the Unicode Consortium, emojis’ governing body, as it were, lists more than 3,500 of them.

The word emoji itself has nothing to do, etymologically, with emoting. It’s a blend of the Japanese words for picture (e) and character (moji)—unlike emoticon, which is an American mix of emotion and icon. This difference in origin and intention also inflected early scientific research into these new communication tools and their impact on the people using them.

Perhaps the first study of how these visual representations activate the brain was presented at a conference in 2006.¹ Computer scientist Masahide Yuasa, then at Tokyo Denki University in Japan, and his colleagues wanted to see whether our noggins interpret abstract symbolic representations of faces—emoticons made of punctuation marks—in the same way as photographic images of them. They popped several college students into a