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The Emoji Tongue - Longreads

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Keith Houston | Longreads | July 1, 2025 | 4,374 words (16 minutes) Excerpted from Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji . Copyright (c) 2025 by Keith Houston. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. In 2015, the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary went all-in on the still-novel phenomenon of emoji. That year, the guardians of the venerable OED named the FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY emoji (😂)—now, as then, the world’s most popular emoji—as Word of the Year, beating out such zingers as “ad blocker,” “Brexit,” “lumbersexual,” “on flee

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