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Comment by msla | Hacker News Reader

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msla

Emoji and emoticons are not the same thing.

Emoticons are things like :) or :D which can be done purely in ASCII. Emoji are actual pictures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji

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They were the same thing at one time. "Emoticons" came first.[1] When someone replaced :-) with a smiley picture, there was a debate about whether they should be called emoticons or emojis. Emoji won out.

1. https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/happy-30th-birthday-emoti...

I recommend https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01L6SI74U/ref=kinw_myk_ro...

It seems like some people are claiming emoticons are retroactively emoji because emoji is the term people know now.

> When someone replaced :-) with a smiley picture, there was a debate about whether they should be called emoticons or emojis

[citation needed].

The history of the word emoji isn't some mysterious thing - the wikipedia article linked in your parent post has it all laid out.

Emoji is a Japanese word meaning pictograph, it isn't derived from the word 'emoticon'. They were developed by Japanese phone companies as an idiomatic expressive addition to Japanese writing, not because 'someone replaced :-) with a smiley picture'. There was no time when they might have ended up being called emoticons.

I don’t have a citation but I remember Yahoo! Chat calling them emoticons.

"Emoticon" used to be the general term and was also often applied to smileys in forums (which are more closely related to the kind of custom "emojis" you still find in places like Slack or Twitch). In those cases the term has definitely been superceded by "emoji" but this is due to them being hard to distinguish from real Unicode emojis.

Right - the fact that Emoji and Emoticons share the first 3 letters is a complete coincidence; The word Emoji is a portmanteau of the Japanese words É (絵; picture) and Moji (文字; letters).

Yeah, I'm not saying emoji came from emoticon. I'm saying some people called them emoticons, and others called them emojis. At some point, we there was a debate about it on the internet (when the internet was much smaller), and the collective decision was to call them emojis.

I'm citing myself as a primary source because I was there when it happened.

"Emoticon" refered to symbol combinations. "Emoji" only arrived on the scene in the English-speaking world via Unicode. I think I've heard both terms being used to refer to kaomojis (CJK symbol combinations) before that but I'm not sure. The only change I'm aware of is that smileys already present in Unicode via extended ASCII are now sometimes also referred to as "emojis" although they technically aren't. They were never called emoticons though and emoticons are generally not called "emojis".

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