Emoji vs. Emoticon

Main Difference

The main difference between Emoji and Emoticon is that the Emoji is a ideograms or smileys used in electronic messages and webpages and Emoticon is a pictorial representation of a facial expression using punctuation marks, numbers and letters.

• Emoji

  Emojis (Japanese: 絵文字（えもじ）, English: ; Japanese: [emodʑi]; 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.

• Emoticon

  An emoticon (, i-MOHT-i-kon, rarely pronounced ), short for “emotion icon”, also known simply as an emote, is a pictorial representation of a facial expression using characters—usually punctuation marks, numbers, and letters—to express a person’s feelings or mood, or as a time-saving method. The first ASCII emoticons, 🙂 and :-(, were written by Scott Fahlman in 1982, but emoticons actually originated on the PLATO IV computer system in 1972.In Western countries, emoticons are usually written at a right angle to the direction of the text. Users from Japan popularized a kind of emoticon called kaomoji (顔文字; lit. 顔(kao)=face, 文字(moji)=character(s)), utilizing the Katakana character set, that can be understood without tilting one’s head to the left. This style arose on ASCII NET of Japan in 1986.As SMS and the internet became widespread in the late 1990s, emoticons became increasingly popular and were commonly used on text messages, internet forums and e-mails. Emoticons have played a significant role in communication through technology, and some devices and applications have provided stylized pictures that do not use text punctuation. They offer another range of “tone” and feeling through texting that portrays specific emotions through facial gestures while in the midst of text-based cyber communication.