Emoji
Encyclopedia
is the Japanese
term for the picture characters or emoticon
s used in Japanese electronic messages and webpages. Originally meaning pictograph, the word literally means e "picture" + moji "letter". The characters are used much like emoticon
s elsewhere, 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 (apologizing) businessman, a face wearing a face mask
or a group of emoji representing popular foods (ramen
noodles, dango
, onigiri
, Japanese curry
, sushi
). The three main Japanese operators, NTT DoCoMo
, au and SoftBank Mobile (formerly Vodafone
), have each defined their own variants of emoji.
Although typically only available in Japan, the characters and code required to use emoji are, thanks to the nature of software development, often present in many phones' software. As a result, some phones, such as the Apple iPhone
, allow access to the symbols without requiring a Japanese operator. Emoji have also started appearing in emailing services such as Gmail
(accessed via Google Labs
) in April 2009 and websites such as Flipnote Hatena. Several SMS applications for Android powered phones now also provide plugins that allow the use of Emoji. Apple's Mac OS X
operating system
supports emoji as of version 10.7 (Lion
).
's i-mode
, each emoji symbol is drawn on a 12x12 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.
au's emoji pictograms are specified using the IMG tag. SoftBank Mobile emojis 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 based on open standards.
(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. 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.
A set of Regional Indicator Symbol
s were defined as part of this set of characters as an alternative to encoding separate characters for national flags.
©®™
In Unicode:
Persons:
😄😊😃☺😉😍😘😚😳😌😁😜😝😒😏😓😔😞😖😥😰😨😣😢
😭😂😲😱😠😡😪😷👿👽💛💙💜💗💚❤💔💓💘✨🌟💢❕❔
💤💨💦🎶🎵🔥💩👍👎👌👊✊✌👋✋👐👆👇👉👈🙌🙏☝👏
💪🚶🏃👫💃👯🙆🙅💁🙇💏💑💆💇💅👦👧👩👨👶👵👴👱👲
👳👷👮👼👸💂💀👣💋👄👂👀👃
Nature:
☀☔☁⛄🌙⚡🌀🌊🐱🐶🐭🐹🐰🐺🐸🐯🐨🐻🐷🐮🐗🐵🐒🐴
🐎🐫🐑🐘🐍🐦🐤🐔🐧🐛🐙🐠🐟🐳🐬💐🌸🌷🍀🌹🌻🌺🍁🍃
🍂🌴🌵🌾🐚
Objects:
🎍💝🎎🎒🎓🎏🎆🎇🎐🎑🎃👻🎅🎄🎁🔔🎉🎈💿📀📷🎥💻📺
📱📠☎💽📼🔊📢📣📻📡➿🔍🔓🔒🔑✂🔨💡📲📩📫📮🛀🚽
💺💰🔱🚬💣🔫💊💉🏈🏀⚽⚾🎾⛳🎱🏊🏄🎿♠♥♣♦🏆👾
🎯🀄🎬📝📖🎨🎤🎧🎺🎷🎸〽👟👡👠👢👕👔👗👘👙🎀🎩👑
👒🌂💼👜💄💍💎☕🍵🍺🍻🍸🍶🍴🍔🍟🍝🍛🍱🍣🍙🍘🍚🍜
🍲🍞🍳🍢🍡🍦🍧🎂🍰🍎🍊🍉🍓🍆🍅
Places:
🏠🏫🏢🏣🏥🏦🏪🏩🏨💒⛪🏬🌇🌆🏯🏰⛺🏭🗼🗻🌄🌅🌃🗽
🌈🎡⛲🎢🚢🚤⛵✈🚀🚲🚙🚗🚕🚌🚓🚒🚑🚚🚃🚉🚄🚅🎫⛽
🚥⚠🚧🔰🏧🎰🚏💈♨🏁🎌🇯🇵🇰🇷🇨🇳🇺🇸🇫🇷🇪🇸🇮🇹🇷🇺🇬🇧🇩🇪
Symbols:
1⃣ 2⃣ 3⃣ 4⃣ 5⃣ 6⃣ 7⃣ 8⃣ 9⃣ 0⃣ #⃣ ⬆⬇⬅➡↗↖↘↙◀▶⏪⏩🆗
🆕🔝🆙🆒🎦🈁📶🈵🈳🉐🈹🈯🈺🈶🈚🈷🈸🈂🚻🚹🚺🚼🚭🅿
♿🚇🚾㊙㊗🔞🆔✳✴💟🆚📳📴💹💱♈♉♊♋♌♍♎♏♐
♑♒♓⛎🔯🅰🅱🆎🅾🔲🔴🔳🕛🕐🕑🕒🕓🕔🕕🕖🕗🕘🕙🕚
⭕❌©®™
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
term for the picture characters or emoticon
Emoticon
An emoticon is a facial expression pictorially represented by punctuation and letters, usually to express a writer’s mood. Emoticons are often used to alert a responder to the tenor or temper of a statement, and can change and improve interpretation of plain text. The word is a portmanteau word...
s used in Japanese electronic messages and webpages. Originally meaning pictograph, the word literally means e "picture" + moji "letter". The characters are used much like emoticon
Emoticon
An emoticon is a facial expression pictorially represented by punctuation and letters, usually to express a writer’s mood. Emoticons are often used to alert a responder to the tenor or temper of a statement, and can change and improve interpretation of plain text. The word is a portmanteau word...
s elsewhere, 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 (apologizing) businessman, a face wearing a face mask
Surgical mask
A surgical mask also known as a procedure mask is intended to be worn by health professionals during surgery and at other times to catch the bacteria shed in liquid droplets and aerosols from the wearer's mouth and nose....
or a group of emoji representing popular foods (ramen
Ramen
is a Japanese noodle dish. It consists of Chinese-style wheat noodles served in a meat- or fish-based broth, often flavored with soy sauce or miso, and uses toppings such as , , kamaboko, green onions, and occasionally corn...
noodles, dango
Dango
is a Japanese dumpling made from mochiko , related to mochi. It is often served with green tea.Dango are eaten year-round, but the different varieties are traditionally eaten in given seasons...
, onigiri
Onigiri
, also known as or rice ball, is a Japanese food made from white rice formed into triangular or oval shapes and often wrapped in nori . Traditionally, an onigiri is filled with pickled ume , salted salmon, katsuobushi, kombu, tarako, or any other salty or sour ingredient as a natural preservative...
, Japanese curry
Japanese curry
is one of the most popular dishes in Japan. It is commonly served in three main forms: , karē udon and karē-pan . Curry rice is most commonly referred to simply as ....
, sushi
Sushi
is a Japanese food consisting of cooked vinegared rice combined with other ingredients . Neta and forms of sushi presentation vary, but the ingredient which all sushi have in common is shari...
). The three main Japanese operators, NTT DoCoMo
NTT DoCoMo
is the predominant mobile phone operator in Japan. The name is officially an abbreviation of the phrase, "do communications over the mobile network", and is also from a compound word dokomo, meaning "everywhere" in Japanese. Docomo provides phone, video phone , i-mode , and mail services...
, au and SoftBank Mobile (formerly Vodafone
Vodafone
Vodafone Group Plc is a global telecommunications company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the world's largest mobile telecommunications company measured by revenues and the world's second-largest measured by subscribers , with around 341 million proportionate subscribers as of...
), have each defined their own variants of emoji.
Although typically only available in Japan, the characters and code required to use emoji are, thanks to the nature of software development, often present in many phones' software. As a result, some phones, such as the Apple iPhone
IPhone
The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...
, allow access to the symbols without requiring a Japanese operator. Emoji have also started appearing in emailing services such as Gmail
Gmail
Gmail is a free, advertising-supported email service provided by Google. Users may access Gmail as secure webmail, as well via POP3 or IMAP protocols. Gmail was launched as an invitation-only beta release on April 1, 2004 and it became available to the general public on February 7, 2007, though...
(accessed via Google Labs
Google Labs
Google Labs was a page created by Google to demonstrate and test new Google projects. Google calls Google Labs,Google also uses an invitation-only phase for trusted testers to test projects including Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Wave and many of these have their own "labs" webpages for...
) in April 2009 and websites such as Flipnote Hatena. Several SMS applications for Android powered phones now also provide plugins that allow the use of Emoji. Apple's Mac OS X
Mac OS X
Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
supports emoji as of version 10.7 (Lion
Mac OS X Lion
Mac OS X Lion is the eighth and current major release of Mac OS X, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers....
).
Legacy encoding of Emoji
For NTT DoCoMoNTT DoCoMo
is the predominant mobile phone operator in Japan. The name is officially an abbreviation of the phrase, "do communications over the mobile network", and is also from a compound word dokomo, meaning "everywhere" in Japanese. Docomo provides phone, video phone , i-mode , and mail services...
's i-mode
I-mode
NTT DoCoMo's i-mode is a mobile internet service popular in Japan. Unlike Wireless Application Protocol, i-mode encompasses a wider variety of internet standards, including web access, e-mail and the packet-switched network that delivers the data...
, each emoji symbol is drawn on a 12x12 pixel
Pixel
In digital imaging, a pixel, or pel, is a single point in a raster image, or the smallest addressable screen element in a display device; it is the smallest unit of picture that can be represented or controlled....
grid. When transmitted, emoji symbols are specified as a two-byte
Byte
The byte is a unit of digital information in computing and telecommunications that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, a byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the basic addressable element in many computer...
sequence, in the private-use range E63E through E757 in the Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
character space, or F89F through F9FC for Shift-JIS
Shift-JIS
Shift JIS is a character encoding for the Japanese language originally developed by a Japanese company called ASCII Corporation in conjunction with Microsoft and standardized as JIS X 0208 Appendix 1...
. The basic specification has 176 symbols, with 76 more added in phones that support C-HTML
C-HTML
C-HTML , also called i-mode-HTML, is a subset of HTML for small information devices, such as first generation smart phones and PDAs, such as DoCoMo's i-mode mobile phones used in Japan...
4.0.
au's emoji pictograms are specified using the IMG tag. SoftBank Mobile emojis are wrapped between SI/SO escape sequences
Shift Out and Shift In characters
Shift Out and Shift In are ASCII control characters 14 and 15, respectively . The original meaning of those characters was to switch to a different character set and back. This was used, for instance, in the Russian character set known as KOI7, where SO starts printing Russian...
, and support colors and animation. DoCoMo's emoji are the most compact to transmit while au's version is more flexible based on open standards.
Emoji 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 GoogleGoogle
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
(Kat Momoi, Mark Davis
Mark Davis (Unicode)
Dr. Mark E. Davis is a co-founder of Unicode, Inc registered in the State of California, U.S.A. on 4th January 1991, and has been leading the company since then as the president that started Unicode project....
, 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
Unicode Consortium
The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization that coordinates the development of the Unicode standard. Its stated goal is to eventually replace existing character encoding schemes with Unicode and its standard Unicode Transformation Format schemes, claiming that many of the existing...
and national standardization bodies of various countries participating in ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2, especially the United States, Germany, Ireland (led by Michael Everson
Michael Everson
Michael Everson is a linguist, script encoder, typesetter, and font designer. His central area of expertise is with writing systems of the world, specifically in the representation of these systems in formats for computer and digital media...
), 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. 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.
A set of Regional Indicator Symbol
Regional Indicator Symbol
The Regional Indicator Symbols are a set of 26 alphabetic characters in the Universal Character Set intended to be used to encode ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 two-letter country codes in a way that allows optional special treatment....
s were defined as part of this set of characters as an alternative to encoding separate characters for national flags.
Emoji characters
In SoftBank's encoding:©®™
In Unicode:
Persons:
😄😊😃☺😉😍😘😚😳😌😁😜😝😒😏😓😔😞😖😥😰😨😣😢
😭😂😲😱😠😡😪😷👿👽💛💙💜💗💚❤💔💓💘✨🌟💢❕❔
💤💨💦🎶🎵🔥💩👍👎👌👊✊✌👋✋👐👆👇👉👈🙌🙏☝👏
💪🚶🏃👫💃👯🙆🙅💁🙇💏💑💆💇💅👦👧👩👨👶👵👴👱👲
👳👷👮👼👸💂💀👣💋👄👂👀👃
Nature:
☀☔☁⛄🌙⚡🌀🌊🐱🐶🐭🐹🐰🐺🐸🐯🐨🐻🐷🐮🐗🐵🐒🐴
🐎🐫🐑🐘🐍🐦🐤🐔🐧🐛🐙🐠🐟🐳🐬💐🌸🌷🍀🌹🌻🌺🍁🍃
🍂🌴🌵🌾🐚
Objects:
🎍💝🎎🎒🎓🎏🎆🎇🎐🎑🎃👻🎅🎄🎁🔔🎉🎈💿📀📷🎥💻📺
📱📠☎💽📼🔊📢📣📻📡➿🔍🔓🔒🔑✂🔨💡📲📩📫📮🛀🚽
💺💰🔱🚬💣🔫💊💉🏈🏀⚽⚾🎾⛳🎱🏊🏄🎿♠♥♣♦🏆👾
🎯🀄🎬📝📖🎨🎤🎧🎺🎷🎸〽👟👡👠👢👕👔👗👘👙🎀🎩👑
👒🌂💼👜💄💍💎☕🍵🍺🍻🍸🍶🍴🍔🍟🍝🍛🍱🍣🍙🍘🍚🍜
🍲🍞🍳🍢🍡🍦🍧🎂🍰🍎🍊🍉🍓🍆🍅
Places:
🏠🏫🏢🏣🏥🏦🏪🏩🏨💒⛪🏬🌇🌆🏯🏰⛺🏭🗼🗻🌄🌅🌃🗽
🌈🎡⛲🎢🚢🚤⛵✈🚀🚲🚙🚗🚕🚌🚓🚒🚑🚚🚃🚉🚄🚅🎫⛽
🚥⚠🚧🔰🏧🎰🚏💈♨🏁🎌🇯🇵🇰🇷🇨🇳🇺🇸🇫🇷🇪🇸🇮🇹🇷🇺🇬🇧🇩🇪
Symbols:
1⃣ 2⃣ 3⃣ 4⃣ 5⃣ 6⃣ 7⃣ 8⃣ 9⃣ 0⃣ #⃣ ⬆⬇⬅➡↗↖↘↙◀▶⏪⏩🆗
🆕🔝🆙🆒🎦🈁📶🈵🈳🉐🈹🈯🈺🈶🈚🈷🈸🈂🚻🚹🚺🚼🚭🅿
♿🚇🚾㊙㊗🔞🆔✳✴💟🆚📳📴💹💱♈♉♊♋♌♍♎♏♐
♑♒♓⛎🔯🅰🅱🆎🅾🔲🔴🔳🕛🕐🕑🕒🕓🕔🕕🕖🕗🕘🕙🕚
⭕❌©®™
External links
- NTT DoCoMo: Emoji
- au by KDDI: Emoji, Type 1 2 (in Japanese)
- Comparison table across all three companies (in Japanese)
- Translated survey on emoji usage patterns
- Emoji Symbols - The original proposals for encoding of Emoji symbols as Unicode characters.
- The Unicode FAQ - Emoji & Dingbats