Rebus > Smiley > Emoji

When I was in elementary school, I loved rebus stories. Not familiar? Random House defines a rebus as:

a representation of a word or phrase by pictures, symbols, etc., that suggest that word or phrase or its syllables: Two gates and a head is a rebus for Gateshead.

Basically, it’s the great granddaddy of emoji.

Emoji are excellent for short-handing long messages and expressing how you feel. However, Unicode / SoftBank encoding, Chrome’s baffling lack of native support, and Android/iOS/Twitter quirks make cross-platform implementation tricky.

Until there’s a better solution, I suggest emojify.js from Hassan Khan. It’s a Javascript library that converts emoji keywords like :Smirk: into images .

Here’s a rebus of what I was listening to all throughout 2012: