The 25 Oldest Emoji on Your Keyboard, Dated to 1993

☢ was not designed for group chats. The radioactive sign entered the Unicode standard in 1993, alongside ☠ skull and crossbones, ⌚ watch, ♟ chess pawn and all twelve zodiac signs. They were catalogued as printing symbols, years before a colour emoji font existed anywhere.

Those characters are still on your phone. The same code points, unchanged. We checked all 1,757 glyphs in our dataset against the file Unicode publishes for exactly this purpose, and 25 of them date back to that first big release.

How we dated them, so you can check the work

Unicode maintains a plain text file called DerivedAge, which records the version in which every single character first appeared. It is the closest thing to a birth certificate that a character has, and it settles arguments that Emojipedia screenshots cannot.

We ran each single code point glyph in our set against that file. The result is a straight count of how many emoji came from each era, and it looks nothing like what people assume. The bulk arrived in one enormous batch, and a small tail stretches back three decades before it.

One caution before the list. Being in Unicode since 1993 is not the same as being an emoji since 1993. These characters existed as typographic symbols for twenty years and were only given colour emoji presentation in 2015, when Emoji 1.0 formalised the set. The character is ancient. The yellow and red drawing of it is not.

The full 1993 list

Twenty five of them, exactly as Unicode dates them:

• ☹ frowning face
• ☠ skull and crossbones
• ⌛ hourglass done
• ⌚ watch
• ☄ comet
• ♟ chess pawn
• ⌨ keyboard
• ☢ radioactive
• ☣ biohazard
• ☸ wheel of dharma
• ☦ orthodox cross
• ☪ star and crescent
• ☮ peace symbol
• ♈ Aries, ♉ Taurus, ♊ Gemini, ♋ Cancer, ♌ Leo, ♍ Virgo, ♎ Libra, ♏ Scorpio, ♐ Sagittarius, ♑ Capricorn, ♒ Aquarius, ♓ Pisces

Every one of those copies straight from this page. The zodiac dozen alone makes up half the list, and each one has its own page in our zodiac symbols collection with the astrological context attached.

Why the zodiac got in so early

The zodiac set also behaves unusually well for its age. Because the twelve signs were encoded as a complete run, they sort cleanly, they all have colour artwork on every vendor, and none of them has the thin outline problem that affects their neighbours on this list.

The twelve signs were not a lifestyle category in 1993. They were typesetting. Astrological and astronomical symbols had been cut into metal type for centuries, and the people assembling Unicode's first releases were working from existing print character sets rather than from anything resembling a chat keyboard.

That is the pattern behind nearly every old entry here. ♟ chess pawn is there because chess notation needed printing. ⌨ keyboard is there for technical manuals. ☢ and ☣ are there for safety labelling. The through line is documents, not conversation.

If you want these as plain text rather than colour tiles, the versions in our planet and astronomy symbols set stay monochrome and survive in usernames where emoji get stripped.

What came next, and when the flood arrived

Dating the whole set produces a shape worth seeing. After 1993 almost nothing happens for a decade. A handful land in 2002 and 2003, sixteen in 2005, twenty six in 2009. Then 2010 arrives and 711 emoji appear at once.

More than half the single character emoji we hold trace to that one release. Unicode 6.0 absorbed the Japanese carrier sets that had been running on domestic phones since the late 1990s, and emoji stopped being a regional handset feature and became part of the text standard everyone shares.

After that the pace settles into something steady: around 100 in 2014, 36 in 2015, 72 in 2016, 56 in 2017, 62 in 2018, 61 in 2019, then single and double digit years through the 2020s. The explosive phase lasted exactly one release.

The oldest emoji that people actually use

Most of the 1993 set is niche. Three are not.

⌚ watch turns up constantly in anything about being late, deadlines or timing. It has outlived the wristwatch as a default object without anyone updating the drawing.

☮ peace symbol carries a heavier load than its age suggests. The design dates to 1958 as a nuclear disarmament badge, so the glyph on your keyboard is a digitisation of a protest logo that was already thirty five years old when Unicode encoded it.

☠ skull and crossbones is the interesting one, because it has a much younger relative that completely eclipsed it. 💀 skull, the one people use for laughing, arrived in the 2010 wave. The 1993 version stayed literal and now reads as poison or danger. Two skulls, seventeen years apart, with opposite tones. We traced how the younger one took over humour in what the skull emoji actually means.

The thin black and white problem

Old emoji share a visual tell. Many render as narrow monochrome outlines instead of full colour tiles, and that is a direct consequence of their age.

Because these characters were text symbols first, fonts default to drawing them as text. Getting the colour version requires an extra invisible instruction attached to the character, and plenty of apps strip it. That is why ☹ sometimes arrives as a thin outline while 🙁 never does.

The practical effect is that the oldest emoji are the least reliable ones to send. If a glyph from this list looks wrong on arrival, the cause is almost always that missing instruction rather than a broken keyboard. We unpacked several lookalike pairs in why some emoji look like duplicates.

The 2002 and 2003 stragglers

Between the 1993 batch and the 2010 flood there is a thin trickle worth noting, because it shows what the committee thought was missing.

Two characters arrived in 2002 and three in 2003. Sixteen followed in 2005 and twenty six in 2009. None of these were conceived as emoji either. They were filling gaps in symbol coverage for publishing, mapping and technical notation, and they only look like a keyboard category in hindsight.

The 2009 group is the most revealing of the lot. Twenty six characters, added one year before the enormous 2010 release, largely because the groundwork for absorbing the Japanese sets was already under way and some overlaps needed encoding first. If you ever wondered why the emoji set has slightly odd seams in it, this is where several of them are.

Checking the age of any emoji yourself

You do not need our dataset to do this. Two routes work.

The quick one is to look the character up on our Unicode versions pages, which group every emoji by the release it belongs to and let you see its neighbours.

The rigorous one is to find the character's code point and search for it in Unicode's DerivedAge file, which is published openly. Be aware of one trap that catches almost everyone: many emoji listings quote the Emoji version rather than the Unicode version, and the two numbers are different systems. A sequence like a flag or a profession emoji is dated by when the sequence was defined, not by the age of the characters inside it, which is why a flag can look much younger than the letters it is built from.

That distinction is the single most common source of wrong dates in emoji writing, and it is worth holding onto before citing any year. Our breakdown of the recent releases and what shipped in each is on the new emoji page.

What is not on the list, despite the rumours

A few glyphs are routinely described as the original emoji and are not in the 1993 set.

• ❤ red heart. The character is from 1993, but it is not in our emoji dataset as a bare code point, and the red tile everyone recognises depends on that extra colour instruction.
• 😀 grinning face. Widely assumed to be ancient, actually dated to 2012. It missed the big 2010 batch by two years.
• The 1999 NTT DoCoMo set. Genuinely the first recognisable emoji, designed by Shigetaka Kurita, but on a Japanese carrier system rather than in Unicode. Those designs influenced the 2010 wave rather than being it.

The full sequence of who shipped what and when is laid out in our emoji evolution story, and the year by year breakdown of the modern releases sits on our Unicode versions page.

Using the old ones well

These glyphs have a particular flavour. They are flatter and more severe than anything from 2010 onward, which makes them useful when you want a graphic look rather than a cartoon one.

• ☮ ☸ ☦ ☪ read as symbols rather than reactions, so they work in bios where a yellow face would feel juvenile.
• ☢ ☣ ☠ give you a hazard register that nothing from the modern set matches.
• The zodiac twelve are the most used of the lot, and they pair naturally with the sets on our star combos page.
• ⌨ ⌛ ⌚ suit anything about work, time and deadlines without the cheerfulness of ⏰ alarm clock.

For more of this flat typographic look, the collections on our symbols hub run to thousands of characters that never became emoji at all, and most of them survive in places where emoji are filtered out.

Why none of them can ever be removed

Unicode does not delete characters. Removing ☢ would break every document that has ever contained it, including documents nobody has opened in twenty years, and that stability guarantee is the reason the standard is trusted for archival text.

Designs get redrawn, which is how Apple's pistol became a water gun across the industry. Names get corrected. Code points stay forever. So the 25 characters on this list are, barring the end of digital text, permanent residents of every keyboard that ships from here on.

That permanence cuts both ways. It is why ☹ still carries a 1993 typesetting aesthetic that clashes with everything around it, and why nobody can tidy up the duplication between the old flat symbols and their modern cartoon equivalents. The set grows and never prunes.

It also means the oldest entries quietly outlive their subject matter. ⌨ keyboard shows a chunky beige terminal board. ⌛ hourglass measures time in a way no one has done for centuries. ♟ chess pawn is the only chess piece that became an emoji while the other five stayed as plain symbols. Each is a small fossil of what 1993 thought was worth encoding, still sitting in a picker next to 🫠 melting face.

If that contrast appeals, the glyphs in our vintage combos lean on exactly this mismatch between old flat symbols and new rounded ones, and the aesthetic emoji page collects more of the same.