Jeremy Burge (born 14 July 1984) is an emoji historian, founder of Emojipedia, creator of World Emoji Day and widely regarded as an expert on emoji. Business Insider listed Burge in the UK Tech 100 in 2016, 2017 and 2018 referring to him as "The Emoji Maestro" while other publications have used terms such as "Emoji King" or "Lord of Emojis". The New Yorker dubbed Burge "The Samuel Johnson of Emoji" in 2020. Emojipedia In July 2013, Burge started the emoji reference site Emojipedia, after wondering how long the doughnut emoji had been in existence, and not being able to find an answer on Google or Wikipedia. The Sydney Morning Herald reported the site had 23 million page views per month in 2017. Burge was Chief Emoji Officer at Emojipedia between 2016 and 2022, overseeing all editorial content on the site. During his time at Emojipedia, Burge worked with professional sportspeople Tony Hawk and Sasha DiGiulian to improve the accuracy of Emojipedia's sample images for the skateboard and rock climber respectively. Jenken Magazine reported: "While they were on the phone one day, Hawk sent Burge a picture of his own board" which was used as the basis of Emojipedia's revised skateboard design. In 2021, Emojipedia served over 500 million annual page views. Emojipedia was acquired by Zedge in August 2021 for an undisclosed amount. Unicode Currently representing Emojipedia on the Unicode Technical Committee, Burge previously held a position as vice-chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee from 2017 to 2019. Described as a leading authority on emoji use, Burge urged Apple to rethink its plan to convert the handgun emoji symbol into a water pistol icon in 2016, citing cross-platform confusion. Emoji flags for England󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿, Scotland󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 and Wales were added to the Unicode Standard in 2017 after a formal proposal co-authored by Burge was approved. Rather than individual code points, they are represented by tag sequences. Speaking to Crikey in 2022, Burge spoke against superfluous emoji additions: “representation is important but I’m not sure we need another abacus or lab coat emoji”. Writing Burge has been a regular news contributor to Emojipedia and responsible for many of the initial emoji definitions on the reference website. Additionally he has written for publications such Six Colors, Medium, and The Internet Review. In 2019 Burge raised the issue of Facebook using user-submitted phone numbers for undocumented purposes, and in 2020 identified TikTok accessing user