emoji (ee-MOH-jee) - n., a small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion.
Pics like 😂. Successor to the purely text-based emoticon (such as ;-). The word first appears in English in 1997, from Japanese enoji (絵文å—), from e, picture + moji, character/letter -- so, a character/letter that is a picture -- which means the resemblance to emotion is coincidental, but no doubt influenced the choice of coinage.
And that wraps up this week of words from Japanese. Ja nai!
---L.
Pics like 😂. Successor to the purely text-based emoticon (such as ;-). The word first appears in English in 1997, from Japanese enoji (絵文å—), from e, picture + moji, character/letter -- so, a character/letter that is a picture -- which means the resemblance to emotion is coincidental, but no doubt influenced the choice of coinage.
And that wraps up this week of words from Japanese. Ja nai!
---L.