The “face with tears of joy” emoji represents “a crying with laughter facial expression,” according to Wikipedia. “The emoji is used in communication to portray joking and teasing on messaging ...

Today there are north of 3,500 accepted emoji characters. They appear in politics, movies, texts, our sex lives, and more. But emoji’s impact has never been explored in full. Keith Houston follows ...

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then what of emoji, that ever-increasingly important part of our lexicon? Face with Tears of Joy: A natural history of emoji by Keith Houston has some insights, ...

Linguists and language pedants generally say no. In “Face With Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji,” Keith Houston, weighing the evidence, concurs. He asserts, however, that there is “a richness ...

Historian Houston (Empire of the Sum) chronicles the rise of the emoji in this fun romp through the evolution of digital language. He begins the account in Japan, where teenagers’ widespread use of ...