Nearly four centuries ago, a lawyer was reviewing municipal account documents in his tiny village nestled next to the Strážov Mountains of Slovakia.
The documents, he believed, were good. So he signed his go-ahead by drawing a small circle with two dots and a line — an image many would recognize today as a smiley-face emoji.
The picture-postcard village is hypothetical, but the face is not. In 1635, Jan Ladislaides relayed his approval of a document with the tiny face, and its discovery makes it the world’s oldest known emoji.
“I do not know if it’s the oldest Slovakian smiley or the world’s oldest,” Peter Brindza, head of the National Archives in Tencin, Slovakia, told Barcroft News. “But it is certainly one of the oldest in the Trencin region.”
Previously, the oldest known smiley face was in a 1648 poem, “To Fortune” by Robert Herrick, from England in 1648. The Slovakia find beats that by 13 years.
Though the drawing could also be interpreted as a straight-face expression — which would signal more doubt than approval — Brindza told Barcroft that the picture follows a passage that states Ladislaides had no problems with the accounts.
Archivists also discovered within the documents a drawing that looks like a pointing clown’s hand — but they’re unsure of its context.
Japanese engineers created the first set of digital emojis in 1999, and the word “emoji” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013.
An estimated 6 billion emojis are sent throughout the world every day.