Person walking

Usually a status update: I'm on foot, heading over. After “where are you?” a lone 🚶 means the sender is walking now, not signalling a mood. Next to a step count or a commute complaint it just logs the walk. It never says where they're going; the surrounding words do that.

Where did the walking emoji come from?

From Japanese phone pictographs, not from traffic lights. Japanese carriers put emoji on phones in the late 1990s: J-Phone (later SoftBank) in 1997, then NTT DoCoMo's influential set in 1999. A 2007 Unicode proposal set out to encode the carriers' pictographs so they survived between networks, and Unicode's mapping ties 🚶 to matching walker symbols from KDDI and SoftBank.

Pedestrian signals are a parallel history. The U.S. Federal Highway Administration's earliest reference is a 1938 New York WALK/WAIT announcement, followed by WALK/DON'T WALK signals in Washington, D.C., in 1939. East Berlin's Ampelmännchen, the little figure on its crossing lights, was proposed in 1961, installed in 1969, and saved by a 1997 campaign.