Emoji: The World’s First Global Language

Emoji are cute. It’s easy to think they’re just for teenagers whose phones are permanently glued to their hands. But, as ever with the humble emoji, there’s so much more beneath the surface — in form, function, history, and future.

Emoticon vs. Emoji

The words emoji, smilies, and emoticons are often used interchangeably — but they mean very different things.

The figure below, representing a smiling face, is an emoticon: a pictographic representation created by combining different typographic characters.

:-)

Users are limited only by their imagination and the available character set. These combinations can range from the very quick and simple (as first illustrated by Scott Fahlman on a college message board in 1982), to the complex and decorative, such as in Japanese kaomoji (the term is the combination of ‘kao,’ meaning face, and ‘moji,’ meaning character).