Long time no sea: finding the seahorse emoji ♥

Happy World Emoji Day! 🎉

It’s celebrated on 17th July because that’s the date shown on the calendar emoji. 📅

To mark the occasion, a fun one: lots of people are certain they remember a seahorse emoji. They can describe it in detail—small, curled tail, usually facing left. But there has never been one. Not in Unicode, not in the famous SoftBank (1997) or NTT DoCoMo (1999) sets or any of the three earlier sets I previously uncovered (1988–1994). It’s become a textbook Mandela Effect, complete with Reddit threads—and lately AI chatbots—spiralling over an emoji that doesn’t exist. 🤖

Except it did exist. Everybody was just looking a decade too late. 🔰

As part of my ongoing research into emoji history, I recently got hold of the manual for the Toshiba Rupo JW 95F, a Japanese word processor from 1988 with a full set of built-in 絵文字 (“emoji”, in what is currently the earliest use of the word next to a set of recognisable emoji). And there, swimming amongst the animals: a cute little seahorse! 🥹

There’s a lovely detail here: the seahorse is fifth in the list of zodiac animals—rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, seahorse, snake, horse—right where the dragon should be. Why? The Japanese word for seahorse is タツノオトシゴ, literally “the dragon’s lost child”. 🐉

So if you remember a seahorse emoji, you’re not imagining things. You might simply have used a Toshiba word processor from 1988. 🤓

There’s still no seahorse in Unicode, though. I’d sign off with one, but… 🐠

My copy of the Toshiba Rupo JW 95F manual is dated 1989 and selected scans can be found here.