Emoji

An emoji is a small picture used in text messages and online, such as a face, a heart or a slice of pizza. The word sounds as if it comes from “emotion”, but it does not. It comes from Japanese: e, meaning picture, and moji, meaning character.^[1] That the word looks like “emotion” in English is a complete coincidence, and is the only coincidence in history to have been so convenient that nobody believed it.

The first set

Among the most influential early emoji sets was one of 176 tiny symbols, each just 12 by 12 pixels, designed in 1999 for a Japanese mobile phone service. They included weather symbols, hearts, faces and a small figure of a person. In 2016 the Museum of Modern Art in New York added the original set to its collection.^[2] Each emoji in the museum is smaller than the label next to it.

Emoji were added to Unicode, the international standard for text characters, in 2010, so that they would look roughly the same on different phones. There are now more than three thousand six hundred. Each one has to be formally proposed and approved by a committee, which is why the arrival of a new vegetable can take years.

Word of the year

In 2015 Oxford Dictionaries chose an emoji as its Word of the Year: the “face with tears of joy”, a laughing face crying with amusement. It was the first time the title had gone to something that was not a word, and the decision was announced, appropriately, in words.

• Origin of the word: Japanese.
• Connection to “emotion”: none.
• First widely used set: 176 symbols (1999).
• Word of the Year 2015: a face, not a word.

See also

• Dot – a very early emoji, arguably
• Yellow – the colour of most faces
• Circle – the shape of most faces
• Fax machine – an earlier way to send a picture

References

1. Moji, E. (1999/2016). Twelve by Twelve. Pixel Press.
2. Character, P. (2010). “Not From Emotion”. Etymology Notes 1: 1.
3. Joy, T. (2015). A Face Is Not a Word. Dictionary Books.