The inclusion of emojis and emoticons has certainly improved chatting and online user experience. The popularity of emoji is as a result of its inclusion in the mobile communication.
First introduced over two decades ago, it is funny how emoji now places a vital role in mobile communication. They communicate when words fail us
In total there are 2,823 emojis in the Unicode Standard. 5 Billion are sent Daily on Messenger. Facebook has released new statistics to coincide with World Emoji Day showing an average of 5 billion emojis sent each day.
A lot of people wonder what is difference between emojis and emoticons.
Emoticons
Emoticon is the combination of two English words emotional and icon. Emoticons are simply punctuations marks combining to make a smiley or an icon when transferred.
Eg :-( is a frowning face while :-) is a smiling face.
Discovered in the Carnegie University in 1982 by Dr Scott Fahlman, It gave birth to what we now know as smiley.
Emoji
Derived from the Japanese word moji meaning picture and inspired by the Manga and Kanji arts.
The emojis was invented in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita and in contrast to emoticons, emoji are pictorial representation of emotions attached to no punctuations or alphabet.
Because of its similarity with Japanese art, emojis keyboard was first preinstalled in the iPhone to attract Japanese users.
Emoji keyboards is virtually in all smart phones. Translation between various platforms is now available with Unicode technology.
Although pre installed for the Japanese but it was the North American users that embraced it first. They are now available across all platform of smart phones with tons of third party emoji keyboard available for installation.
So the difference is simple despite their similarity. There are now icons for virtually anything you can think of stretching from a smiling face to a pizza.
