Emojis were created in 1998 by Shigetaka Kurita, an engineer at Japanese phone company NTT Docomo, as a way for customers to communicate through icons. Since then, emojis have grown tremendously in popularity and usage, being added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013. Emojis are now commonly used to express emotions, actions, times, and locations in electronic communications as a way to save time compared to typing out full descriptions or feelings in words.