World Emoji Day is celebrated on July 17 every year and the reason behind it is Jeremy Burge, founder of Emojipedia. The 37-year-old introduced this day back in 2014. 

Burge was born on July 14, 1984, in Australia, and is an emoji historian widely considered to be an expert on the subject. Over the years, he’s been called various monikers including ‘Emoji Maestro’, ‘Emoji King’, and ‘Lord of Emojis’. 

He’s studied at Assumption College, Kilmore and Deakin University. 

In 2013, Burge created the emoji referencing site Emojipedia, after wondering for a long time about the duration of the doughnut emoji’s existence, and being unable to find the information on Google or Wikipedia. His site had 23 million page views every month, in 2017,  as per The Sydney Morning Herald. 

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Zedge acquired it in 2021 but Burge was the Chief Emoji Officer from 2016 to 2022 and oversaw all of the site’s editorial content. Burge also worked with sportspeople like Tony Hawk, with whose help some of the emojis became more accurate. As per Jenken Magazine, Hawk sent Burge a picture of his skateboard, while they were on the phone one day, and Emojipedia’s revised skateboard design came from this. 

Currently, he represents Emojipedia on the Unicode Technical Committee and was vice-chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee from 2017 to 2019. Some of Burge’s contributions include urging Apple to consider changing its handgun emoji to a water pistol, to avoid cross-platform confusion. 

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He’s also hosted the Emojiwrap podcast and has contributed to other publications like Medium and Six Colors. Apart from that, Burge lives on his 53 ft narrowboat named Dottie M. He’s gained some popularity via TikTok videos where he navigates the canals and rivers of the United Kingdom. Burge has been hosted by reputable institutes including The British Library and University College London.