When emojis made their way onto the internet in the 80's, people were finally able to show emotion in their emails by writing different variations of commas, semicolons and parentheses.
At that time it was called emoticon = a combination of the English "emotion" and icon ".
But today we have emojis for almost everything.
And we use them frequently.
Every day, about five billion emojis are used, on Facebook and Messenger alone, according to the statistics company Statista.
- In many cases, you benefit from, for example, sending a thumbs up instead of writing "Yes, it will be good" so there is a form of efficiency in the whole, says Beata Junselius.
According to her, efficiency is one of the main reasons why we have started to rely on emojis and in many cases replace text with them.
- But because it is so effective and that it goes so fast when we grind off this "extra fluff" that you could use to clarify a message, there is also a risk of more misunderstandings.
Do we all mean the same thing when we use an emoji? SVT's reporter went out on the town with a bunch of emojis to test - see more in the video!