Domino’s really said “Your favourite pizza is just one emoji away.” when they launched their ‘Text a pizza emoji to place your order’ system. 2015 was a wild ride if you were an emoji. From being tagged in Hillary Clinton’s tweet, to Domino’s marketer, to winning ‘Word of the Year’ from Oxford Dictionary. But these are some of the literal use cases of emojis. Unless you’re living under a rock, food emojis aren’t always (more like; barely ever) used literally.

Rising Stonks 📈

The emoji’s rise to stardom was no fluke. The Internet superhighway enabled 2 important things; 1) fast information transfer and 2) global accessibility. Now, we needed a language that could support them. Enter the emoji. Emojis were extremely compatible with both of these features. They take up a single character space but can still express complex emotions that can be easily understood by people worldwide.

Timeline ⏳

• 1999

  Shigetaka Kurita invents emojis

• 2001

  The recognizable yellow-faced emojis are developed by a company called The Smiley Company and are called ‘smileys’

• 2008

  Apple develops a special emoji keyboard for their Japanese customers

• 2010

  Emojis get adopted into the unicode encoding system

• 2011

  Apple introduces the emoji keyboard in their official iOS giving people access to emojis globally

• 2015

  ‘Face with tears of joy’ emoji (😂) becomes the first emoji to win the ‘Word of the Year’ title from Oxford Dictionary

Literally, not Literal 😉

Remember the ‘complex emotions’ we talked about earlier? Let’s get into that. When designing emojis, Shigetaka Kurita was inspired by pictograms and manga; both of which are meant to be taken literally.

But, as is human nature, we started associating some of it with different meanings. While most emojis have literal meanings, it’s the popular ones that you have to look out for. If someone texted asking to “show your ‘🍒’” you would think they were interested in your breakfast, right? Right!? But, we know that that’s far from the truth. Curiously, the origins of these hidden meanings are all over the place. It could be from the shape, the colours, a rhyming word, or even specific details.

Sexting with Food 🫦

By far the most common use of the food emojis with alternate meanings is sexting. Among them the most recognizable is the ‘🍆’. People began associating the emoji with its similarly shaped male genitalia. According to the ‘American Speech’ journal, ‘🍆’ was used for its NSFW meaning as early as 2011. In fact, this predates the official release of the emoji keyboard on iPhones. Which meant the user had to install Japanese apps to use ‘🍆’ just to say they weren’t getting any. 

As websites like OnlyFans began gaining popularity, so did ‘🌶️’. Though not nearly as famous as its phallic cousin, the hot pepper emoji is widely used by creators offering ‘spicy’ content. After TikTok banned adult content, these creators also introduced the ‘🌽’ emoji to the app due to its phonetic similarity to ‘porn’.

On Christmas of 2016, a group of teenage girls came up with a code of fruit emojis. The code was meant to ‘confuse the boys’. Over a few months, Snapchat saw an explosion of fruit emojis that confused not only ‘the boys’ but most of Twitter. The girls used these emojis to depict their relationship status. Most interestingly the ‘🥑’ with the pit denoting the fuller of the 2 halves of the avocado indicating ‘the better half’.

SFW Food Emojis 🧍 

While most of these are used in the context of sex, there are a few emojis that have family-friendly alternate meanings.

Emojis aren’t always restricted to light-hearted banter. Following the second ban of the Palestinian flags in Israel, social media was covered with the ‘🍉’. The colours that make up a watermelon cross-section match the colours on the Palestinian flag. Protestors took to the streets with signs of the emoji demanding to free Palestine.

On the lighter side, if your friend sends you a ‘☕’, get ready for some gossip. ‘Spilling the tea’ originated from the gay black community and got adopted into our text lingo. And eventually got abbreviated into just the ‘☕’.

For those who are marijuana-positive, you’re probably familiar with the ‘🥦’. In fact, its use has been so normalised that police in Kyoto, Japan are warning people to stay away from messages with the ‘🥦’.

The Final Take(aways) 🎬

Starting from just 176 pictograms, emojis have grown to a staggering 3,782. A lot of them have their hidden meanings which may not be obvious at times. But hopefully, now, if someone slides into your DMs, you know what they mean.

It’s cool to see how creative humans can be. I’m excited to see more of what people come up with in the future. If you have any ideas for alternate meanings or if I missed an emoji, please let me know in the comments! 🫶

Emoji	Definition
🍆/🥒	Male genitalia
🍑	Buttocks
🍈	Breasts
🌮	Female genitalia
🌶️	NSFW Content
🌽	Porn
🍾	Orgasm
🍜	Nudes (from ‘noods’)
🫐	Single (relationship status)
🍍	It’s Complicated (relationship status)
🍇	Don’t want to Commit (relationship status)
🍒	Breasts/Are in a Committed Relationship (relationship status)
🍋	Beyonce’s ‘Lemonade’ album/Want to be Single (relationship status)
🍌	Male genitalia/Married (relationship status)
🥑	Pregnant/Better Half (relationship status)
🍓	Can’t Find Mr. Right (relationship status)
🍉	Support for Palestine
🥦	Marijuana
🍿	Movies
🍎	Apple Products
🍕	Party
🫒	Coming in Peace