Emoji

How to spell emoji

5 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce emoji

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does emoji mean?

1. nounA small digital image or icon used in electronic messages to express an idea, mood, or object.

Emoji in a sentence

• She added a smiling emoji to soften the tone of her reply.

• The marketing team chose a single emoji to represent the brand in chats.

Where does emoji come from?

Language of origin: Japanese

The word emoji comes directly from Japanese, where it combines e, meaning 'picture', with moji, meaning 'character' or 'letter'. The earliest emoji were small pictorial symbols designed for Japanese mobile phones in the late 1990s, giving users a quick way to add tone and feeling to short text messages. Although the look of the word suggests a link to the English 'emotion' or 'emoticon', that resemblance is a coincidence: the two parts are purely Japanese and have nothing to do with the Latin root of 'emotion'. The term spread into English around 2010 to 2013 as smartphones adopted a shared set of these images, and dictionaries soon recorded it. Because the word is a borrowing rather than a native build, its plural is usually left as emoji, though emojis is now widely accepted too.

How the word is built

• e (picture)
• moji (character, letter)