Emojimania: Fans and brands crying tears of joy

If you don't know what that means then you: a aren't a 14-year-old girl. b love to hate those tiny pictures that people text you all the time.

Or c are nowhere near a smartphone or online chat.

The Face was chosen by Oxford Dictionaries as its 2015 "word" of the year, based on its popularity and reflecting the rise of emojis to help charitable causes, promote businesses and generally assist oh-so-many-more of us in further expressing ourselves on social media and in texts.

Emoji overseers approved a taco character last year after a yearlong campaign by the company to get one up and running, rewarding users of said taco on Twitter with gifts of free photos, GIFs and other virtual playthings to celebrate.

While there's now a strict definition of emojis as images created through standardized computer coding that works across platforms, they have many, many popular cousins by way of "stickers," which are images without the wonky back end.

While everybody from Coca-Cola to the Kitten Bowl have come up with little pictographs to whip up interest in themselves, emojis exist mainly to nuance the words regular folk type, standing in for tone of voice, facial expressions and physical gestures — extended middle finger emoji added recently.

Emoji enthusiasts have played with telling word-free stories using their little darlings alone and translating song lyrics into the pictures, "but they can't be put together like letters to make a pronounceable word," McCulloch said.

Back when Kurita was creating some of the first emojis, chaos already had ensued in trying to make all the pagers and all the emerging mobile phones and the newfangled thing called email and everything else Internet-ish that was bubbling up speak to each other.

[...] to allow people in Japan used to a more formal way of communicating make themselves understood in the emerging shorthand.

Unicode, co-founded and headed by Mark Davis in Zurich, has a big, big mission, of which emojis have a place: making sure all the languages in the world are encoded and supported across platforms and devices.

Demand for a female runner, for instance, will be voted on in May as critics have questioned a male-female divide.

Vivian Rosenthal is founder and head of Snaps, a platform on which keyboards full of branded images are launched, including marketing campaigns intended to support social causes, such as the plight of refugees.

With nearly half of all Instagram posts now including at least one emoji and with more than 270 billion text messages sent a day across all mobile devices, brands are trying big time to monetize emojis, Rosenthal said.

Are we, in the grand scheme, now dependent on emojis in some profound way?

Akash Nigam, the 23-year-old co-founder and chief executive of Blend, a group messaging app focused on Millennials and GenZers, thinks emoji use among those age groups has a slightly more urgent element.