How the typewriter thinks

Behind the keys is a dictionary of 735 entries — 694 single words and 41 whole phrases — and the phrases always go first. That ordering matters more than it sounds: if the machine matched word by word, “a piece of cake” would come out as a piece of 🍰, which is a dessert, not an idiom. Phrase-first matching catches the whole saying and swaps in 🧩🍰 — the rebus for easy — before the single-word pass ever sees the sentence.

The density slider is deterministic, not random. At 50% it converts every second match, evenly spaced through your text, so the same input always produces the same output — you can share a result and a friend can reproduce it exactly. The matcher also does light stemming: dogs, running, stopped and parties all land on their dictionary roots, so a story written in past tense converts just as densely as one in the present.

From 176 pixels to 3,953

The first emoji set was drawn by Shigetaka Kurita in 1999 for NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode mobile internet service in Japan: 176 pictures, each just 12 by 12 pixels — hearts, weather, moods, a rudimentary 🍺. In October 2016 the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired that original set for its permanent collection, filing it alongside the @ symbol as design history.

The count has grown almost every year since Unicode took over standardisation. As of Unicode 17.0, released on 9 September 2025, there are 3,953 emojis recommended for general interchange — that release alone added 163, including an orca, a trombone, a treasure chest and a Bigfoot-style hairy creature. One casualty: a proposed apple-core emoji was withdrawn at the last minute and never shipped. The typewriter’s own dictionary uses a curated few hundred of the total — the ones that read instantly at message size.

You only ever use ten of them

Here is the tension the typewriter exists to break: thousands of emojis are available, and almost nobody uses them. When the Unicode Consortium published its emoji frequency rankings in December 2021, 😂 Face with Tears of Joy sat at number one — the same character Oxford Dictionaries had already crowned its Word of the Year back in 2015, the first time a pictograph took the title. Usage is so concentrated that a small top slice of emojis accounts for the overwhelming majority of everything sent.

That concentration is a habit, not a limit. Your vocabulary already maps onto hundreds of pictures — 🦒 for tall, 🐌 for slow, ⛈️ for the storm in your weather complaint — you simply never reach for them mid-sentence. The typewriter reaches for you. Run the storybook preset over an ordinary paragraph and count how many emojis appear that you have literally never typed.

The rebus is older than the alphabet

Full Rebus mode — where the words vanish and only pictures remain — feels like a modern game, but it is one of the oldest tricks in writing. Egyptian hieroglyphs leaned on the rebus principle: use the picture of a thing for its sound, and suddenly pictures can spell anything. When the typewriter turns believe into 🐝🍃, it is running a 5,000-year-old algorithm.

The modern lineage has a precise birthday. On 19 September 1982, computer scientist Scott Fahlman posted to a Carnegie Mellon University bulletin board proposing :-) to mark jokes — the emoticon, punctuation pretending to be a face. Emoji replaced the pretending with actual pictures, and rebus puzzles like ⏰🪰 (time flies) became a genre of their own. If you would rather build those puzzles than decode them, that is exactly what our Emoji Saying Maker is for — and it is the same game our YouTube Shorts play.

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Sources

• Unicode Consortium / Emojipedia — emoji statistics: 3,953 emojis as of Unicode 17.0, 9 September 2025 (total count, Emoji 17.0 additions, withdrawn apple core).
• Unicode Consortium — emoji frequency rankings, December 2021 (😂 ranked most-used).
• Museum of Modern Art, New York — acquisition of Shigetaka Kurita’s original 176-emoji NTT DoCoMo set, October 2016.
• Scott Fahlman, Carnegie Mellon University — original :-) bulletin-board post, 19 September 1982 (preserved by CMU).
• Oxford Dictionaries — Word of the Year 2015: 😂 Face with Tears of Joy (announced November 2015).

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