Hosta

A sample of Emoji from Google's "Hangouts" in a previous version of the app

Emoji (絵文字（えもじ）^?, Japanese pronunciation: [emodʑi]) are the ideograms or smileys used in Japanese electronic messages and Web pages, 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 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 mobile 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, emoji have become increasingly popular after their international inclusion in Apple's iOS in 2011 as the Apple Color Emoji typeface,^[1][2] which was followed by similar adoption by Android and other mobile operating systems.^[3] Apple's OS X operating system supports emoji as of version 10.7 (Lion).^[4] 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 exact appearance of Emoji is not prescribed but varies between fonts, in the same way that normal typefaces can display a letter differently. For example, Apple Color Emoji font is proprietary to Apple, and can only be used on Apple devices. Different computing companies have developed their own fonts to display emoji, some of which have been open-sourced to permit their reuse.^[5][6] Both colour and monochrome emoji typefaces exist, as well as at least one animated design.^[7]

History

The first emoji was created in 1998 or 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita, who was part of the team working on NTT DoCoMo's i-mode mobile Internet platform. The first set of 172 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.^[8]

Legacy encoded emoji

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 176 symbols, with 76 more added in phones that support C-HTML 4.0.

Emoji pictograms by 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.

SoftBank Unicode Private Use Area encoding

This encoding was used in Apple's iOS prior to version 5.^[9] It uses the following characters from the Unicode Private Use Area (this is unlikely to display correctly on systems that do not use SoftBank encoding, but a conversion table is available between Unicode, SoftBank and various other encodings^[10]).

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©®™

In the Unicode standard

Hundreds of emoji characters were encoded in the Unicode Standard in version 6.0 released in October 2010 (and in the related international standard ISO/IEC 10646). The additions, originally requested by Google (Kat Momoi, Mark Davis, and Markus Scherer wrote the first draft for consideration by the Unicode Technical Committee in August 2007) and Apple Inc. (whose Yasuo Kida and Peter Edberg joined the first official UTC proposal for 607 characters as coauthors in January 2009), went through a long series of commenting by members of the Unicode Consortium and national standardization bodies of various countries participating in ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2, especially the United States, Germany, Ireland (led by Michael Everson), and Japan; various new characters (especially symbols for maps and European signs) were added during the consensus-building process.

The core emoji set as of Unicode 6.0 consists of 722 characters, of which 114 characters map to sequences of one or more characters in the pre-6.0 Unicode standard, and the remaining 608 characters map to sequences of one or more characters introduced in Unicode 6.0.^[11] There is no block specifically set aside for emoji – the new symbols were encoded in seven different blocks (some newly created), and there exists a Unicode data file called EmojiSources.txt that includes mappings to and from the Japanese vendors' legacy character sets. "Regional indicator symbols" were defined as part of this set of characters as an alternative to encoding separate characters for national flags. An additional group of approximately 250 emoji, many of which were adopted from Webdings and Wingdings fonts, are included in Unicode 7.0. 41 additional emoji, including combining characters that specify the skin tone of preceding person emoji; articles of sports equipment such as the cricket bat; food items such as the taco; signs of the Zodiac; new facial expressions; and symbols for places of worship are included in Unicode 8.0.^[12][13]

Blocks

Additional emoji can be found in the following Unicode blocks: Arrows, CJK Symbols and Punctuation, Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement, Enclosed CJK Letters and Months, Enclosed Ideographic Supplement, General Punctuation, Geometric Shapes, Latin-1 Supplement, Letterlike Symbols, Mahjong Tiles, Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows, Miscellaneous Technical, Playing Cards, and Supplemental Arrows-B.

Usage

Android

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.^[14] Emoji is also supported by the Google Hangouts application (independent of the keyboard in use), in both hangout and SMS modes.^[15] Several third-party messaging and keyboard applications (such as SwiftKey) for Android operating system phones^[16] also provide plugins that allow the use of emoji.

Chrome

Chrome OS, through its inclusion of the Noto fonts, supports the emoji set introduced through Unicode 6.2. As of Chrome OS 41, Noto Color Emoji is the default font for most emoji.

Linux

Some Linux distributions support Emoji Characters after installing extra fonts. In Ubuntu or Debian based distributions this can be achieved by installing the Package ttf-ancient-fonts, in Fedora or openSUSE—by installing Package gdouros-symbola-fonts.^[17] This will install the Symbola font.

Microsoft Windows

Windows 8 and higher supports the full Unicode emoji characters through Microsoft's Segoe UI family of fonts. Emoji characters are accessed through the onscreen keyboard's "smiley" key. As of Windows 8.1 Preview, Segoe UI Emoji font supplies full-color pictographs. Differently than OS X & iOS, color glyphs are only supplied when the application supports Microsoft's DirectWrite API, and Segoe UI Emoji is explicitly declared, otherwise monochrome glyphs appear. An update for the Segoe UI Symbol font in Windows 7 and in Windows Server 2008 R2 brings a subset of the monochrome Unicode set to those operating systems.^[18] The font update rebrands the font as Segoe UI Symbol. The difference between the two fonts is that Segoe UI lacks any and all Emoji characters, while Segoe UI Symbol does not.

OS X and iOS

The mini character palette showing emoji emoticons

Apple first introduced emoji to their desktop operating system with the release of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. Users can view Emoji characters sent through email and messaging applications, which are commonly shared by mobile users, as well as any other application. Users can create Emoji symbols using the "Characters" special input panel from almost any Mac OS X application by selecting the “Edit” menu and pulling down to “Special Characters”, or by the key combination ⌘ Command+⌥ Option+T. OS X uses the Apple Color Emoji font that was introduced in iOS. This provides users with full color pictographs.^[19]

With the introduction of Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks, users can now access a dedicated emoji input palette in most text input boxes by using the key combination. ⌘ Command+Ctrl+Space.^[20]

General

Any operating system that supports adding additional fonts (this would include most operating systems except Chrome and Android) can add an emoji-supporting font. The public domain font Symbola contains all emoji (in monochrome) through version 8.0.

See also

• iConji
• Kaomoji

References

External links

• Unicode Technical Report #51: Unicode emoji
  • The Unicode FAQ - Emoji & Dingbats
  • Emoji Symbols — The original proposals for encoding of Emoji symbols as Unicode characters.
  • Background data for Unicode proposal

Unofficial documents:

• Emoji Translate - Online translation tool from English to Emoji.
• au by KDDI: Emoji, Type 1 2 (in Japanese)
• A table displaying available emojis without requiring Unicode
• Platform independent emoji dictionary