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Emoji

Emoji
Symbol sets Emoji
Assigned 1,088 code points
Unicode version history
1.0.0 78 (+78)
3.0 80 (+2)
3.2 88 (+8)
4.0 96 (+8)
4.1 111 (+15)
5.1 115 (+4)
5.2 142 (+27)
6.0 858 (+716)
6.1 871 (+13)
7.0 975 (+104)
8.0 1,016 (+41)
9.0 1,088 (+72)
Note: These counts are for emoji that are single Unicode characters; many more emoji are composed of sequences of two or more characters. Emoji were first defined in Unicode 6.0, and pre-6.0 characters were only defined as emoji in 6.0 or later.

Emoji (Japanese: 絵文字えもじ?, Japanese pronunciation: [emodʑi]; English: /iˈmoʊ.dʒi/, plural emoji or emojis) are ideograms and smileys used in electronic messages and Web pages. Emoji are used much like emoticons and exist in various genres, including facial expressions, common objects, places and types of weather, and animals.

Originating on Japanese mobile phones in the late 1990s, emoji have become increasingly popular worldwide since their international inclusion in Apple's iPhone, which was followed by similar adoption by Android and other mobile operating systems. Apple's OS X operating system supports emoji as of version 10.7 (Lion). Microsoft added monochrome Unicode emoji coverage to the Segoe UI Symbol system font in Windows 8 and added color emoji in Windows 8.1 via the Segoe UI Emoji font. The first international Emojicon conference was held in San Francisco, California on November 4, 2016.

Originally meaning pictograph, the word emoji comes from Japanese (絵, "picture") + (文字, "character"). The resemblance to the English words emotion and emoticon is purely coincidental.

Emoji were initially used by 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 emoji was created in 1998 or 1999 in Japan by Shigetaka Kurita, who 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. 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.


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