Emoji

Emoji

Emoji (絵文字 or えもじ; Japanese pronunciation: [emodʑi]) are the ideograms or smileys used in Japanese electronic messages and webpages, the use of which is spreading outside Japan. Originally meaning pictograph, the word emoji literally means "picture" (e) + "character" (moji). The characters are used much like ASCII emoticons or kaomoji, but a wider range is provided, and the icons are standardized and built into the handsets. Some emoji are very specific to Japanese culture, such as a bowing (apologizing) businessman, a face wearing a face mask, a white flower used to denote "brilliant homework" or a group of emoji representing popular foods: ramen noodles, dango, onigiri, Japanese curry, and sushi. The three main Japanese operators, NTT DoCoMo, au, and SoftBank Mobile (formerly Vodafone), have each defined their own variants of emoji.[citation needed]

Although originally only available in Japan, some emoji character sets have been incorporated into Unicode, allowing them to be used elsewhere as well. As a result, some phones such as the Windows Phone and the iPhone lines allow access to the symbols without requiring a Japanese carrier. Emoji have also started appearing in emailing services such as Gmail (accessed via Google Labs) in April 2009[1] and websites such as Flipnote Hatena. Apple's Mac OS X operating system supports emoji as of version 10.7 Lion with the Apple Color Emoji typeface.[2]

Android devices support emoji differently depending on the operating system version. Google added native emoji support to the Google Keyboard in November 2013 for devices running Android 4.4 and later.[3] Emoji is also supported by the Google Hangouts application (independent of the keyboard in use), in both hangout and SMS modes.[4] Several third-party messaging and keyboard applications (such as SwiftKey) for Android operating system phones[5] also provide plugins that allow the use of emoji.

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