Emoji

Emojis (Japanese: .mw-parser-output ruby>rt,.mw-parser-output ruby>rtc{font-feature-settings:'ruby'1}.mw-parser-output ruby.large{font-size:250%}.mw-parser-output ruby.large>rt,.mw-parser-output ruby.large>rtc{font-size:.3em}絵文字（えもじ）, English: /ɪˈmoʊdʒi/; Japanese: ; singular emoji, plural emoji or emojis) are ideograms and smileys used in electronic messages and web pages. Emoji exist in various genres, including facial expressions, common objects, places and types of weather, and animals. They are much like emoticons, but emoji are actual pictures instead of typographics. Originally meaning pictograph, the word emoji comes from Japanese e (絵, 'picture') + moji (文字, 'character'); the resemblance to the English words emotion and emoticon is purely coincidental. The ISO 15924 script code for emoji is Zsye. Originating on Japanese mobile phones in 1997, emoji became increasingly popular worldwide in the 2010s after being added to several mobile operating systems. They are now considered to be a large part of popular culture in the west. In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries named the Face with Tears of Joy emoji the Word of the Year. The development of emoji was predated by text-based emoticons, as well as graphical representations, inside and outside of Japan. The earliest known mobile phone in Japan to include a set of emoji was released by J-Phone on November 1, 1997. The set of 90 emoji included many that would later be added to the Unicode Standard, such as Pile of Poo, but as the phone was very expensive they were not widely used at the time. In 1999, Shigetaka Kurita created the first widely-used set of emoji. He was part of the team working on NTT DoCoMo's i-mode mobile Internet platform. Kurita took inspiration from weather forecasts that used symbols to show weather, Chinese characters and street signs, and from manga that used stock symbols to express emotions, such as lightbulbs signifying inspiration. Emoji were initially used (see Japanese mobile phone culture) by the Japanese mobile operators NTT DoCoMo, au, and SoftBank Mobile (formerly Vodafone). These companies each defined their own variants of emoji using proprietary standards. The first set of 176 12×12 pixel emoji was created as part of i-mode's messaging features to help facilitate electronic communication, and to serve as a distinguishing feature from other services. Kurita created the first 180 emoji based on the expressions that he observed people making and other things in the city. For NTT DoCoMo's i-mode, each emoji is drawn on a 12×12 pixel grid. When transmitted, emoji symbols are specified as a two-byte sequence, in the private-use range E63E through E757 in the Unicode character space, or F89F through F9FC for Shift JIS. The basic specification has 1706 symbols, with 76 more added in phones that support C-HTML 4.0. Emoji pictograms by Japanese mobile phone brand Au are specified using the IMG tag. SoftBank Mobile emoji are wrapped between SI/SO escape sequences, and support colors and animation. DoCoMo's emoji are the most compact to transmit while Au's version is more flexible and based on open standards.