Do emoji speak louder than words?

Admit it–sometimes, words fail you.

Phrases get fumbled. Capturing the right shade of subtlety is tricky. Deeper meanings get lost in translation. Plus, you’ve read that thing about the Danish word hygge, or how the Georgian language has a single-syllable word for “the day after tomorrow,” and you’ve wondered: is this really the best we can do?

Written and spoken language—our go-to, bread-and-butter, hub-of-all-things communication system—does so much, but it can’t do everything. What sentence could properly convey the sentiment behind 🌈🦄🌟🎈🎆? Does “congratulations on finishing your chemo” really cut it? And can anything throw shade better than a solitary side-eye emoji...😒?

Humans are meaning-making machines, and the surprising depth, subtlety, and sheer complexity of what we have become capable of conveying to one another in the last decade alone—absent body language, outside the bounds of written and spoken language, and with a relatively limited and relatively stable set of images—is staggering. Welcome to emoji: the linguistic frontier.