Emoji

Emoji (Japanese: 絵文字えもじ, English: /ɪˈmoʊdʒiː/; Japanese: [emodʑi]; singular emoji, plural emoji or emojis) are s and s 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 s, but emoji are actual pictures instead of s. Originally meaning, the word emoji comes from Japanese e (絵, "picture") + moji (文字, "character"); the resemblance to the English words emotion and emoticon is. The script code for emoji is.

History
Originating on in 1997, emoji became increasingly popular worldwide after being added to several mobile operating systems. Emoji were first standardized internationally in Unicode 6.0, released in 2010. They are now considered to be a large part of in. In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries named the (😂) the Word of the Year.

Communications problems
Research has shown that emoji are often misunderstood. In some cases, this misunderstanding is related to how the actual emoji design is interpreted by the viewer; in other cases, the emoji that was sent is not shown in the same way on the receiving side.

The first issue relates to the cultural or contextual interpretation of the emoji. When the author picks an emoji, they think about it in a certain way, but the same character may not trigger in the mind of the receiver. For example, people in China have developed a system for using emoji subversively, so that a smiley face could be sent to convey a despising, mocking, and even obnoxious attitude, as the orbicularis oculi (the muscle near that upper eye corner) on the face of the emoji does not move, and the orbicularis oris (the one near the mouth) tightens, which is believed to be a sign of suppressing a smile.

The second problem relates to technology and branding. When an author of a message picks an emoji from a list, it is normally encoded in a non-graphical manner during the transmission, and if the author and the reader do not use the same software or operating system for their devices, the reader's device may visualize the same emoji differently. Small changes to a character's look may completely alter its perceived meaning with the receiver.

Support by Apple
Apple supports emoji in iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS. Emoji support first appeared as a set of 471 s in the Japanese version of iPhone OS 2.2 in November 2008. Unicode-based support was added for some regions in iOS 4. Full international support of the emoji keyboard was rolled out in iOS 5 in 2011.

In 2017, iOS 11 for the iPhone X and iPad Pro added support for Animoji, in which large emoji are tracked to the motion of the user detected by the TrueDepth camera. In 2018, iOS 12 added support for Memoji, in which the Animoji could be customized to resemble the user or other characters. In 2019, iOS 13 expanded static Memoji support to devices with an Apple A9 or later processor.

Apple customarily issues new emoji on, which is on July 17 of each year. On July 17, 2018, Apple's senior management changed their profile pictures to Memoji to promote the new feature.