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Comment by nothrabannosir | Hacker News Reader

That is absolutely an emoji. The term predates their inclusion in Unicode.

It's absolutely not an emoji. At best, it's an emoticon.

> Originally meaning pictograph, the word emoji comes from Japanese e (絵, "picture") + moji (文字, "character"). The resemblance to the English words emotion and emoticon is purely coincidental.

Emoji specifically refers to these 'pictures' that were definitely transmitted via Unicode, originating in the 90s from Japan.

> For NTT DoCoMo's i-mode, each emoji is drawn on a 12×12 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.

As you pointed out, this predates the Unicode standard that we have now, but there is still a very distinct difference between emoticons (which this is) and emojis (which this definitely isn't)

I believe these text based characters are called emoticons whereas an emoji is an image.

Well, then I was absolutely wrong.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I've noticed more an more people using emojis to encompass the little text drawings, so I think we're actually in the middle of shifting usage.

I believe you did that on purpose, good sir, so you had an excuse to shrug.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

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

> Users from Japan popularized a kind of emoticon called kaomoji (顔文字; lit. 顔(kao)=face, 文字(moji)=character(s)) that can be understood without tilting one's head to the left.

Interesting. So more accurately, this is a kaomoji.

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