An emoji is a pictographic character encoded in the Unicode standard, such as a smiling face or a thumbs up, that apps display as a small image within ordinary text. The word comes from Japanese, roughly meaning "picture character".
Why it matters
Emoji add tone to short written messages and are now used in chats, social posts, email subjects and marketing. Because they are standard characters, they are copied and pasted like any other text. But their appearance depends on the platform: the same code point is drawn differently by Apple, Google and Microsoft fonts, so a message can look slightly different, or show an empty box on old systems that lack the glyph.
Example
The thumbs-up emoji is Unicode code point U+1F44D. In UTF-8 it takes four bytes: F0 9F 91 8D. Skin-tone variants are made by following the base character with a modifier code point, and some emoji are sequences of several characters joined together.
Common mistakes
- Assuming an emoji looks identical for every recipient.
- Using emoji as the only way to carry important meaning, which fails for screen readers and users on older devices.
- Mixing up an emoji with an emoticon, which is built from keyboard characters like
:-).
Related
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