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Comment by stordoff | Hacker News Reader

Part of this article touches on why I don't use emoji[1] - I don't know what they will look to the recipient most of the time. At least with emoticons/kaomoji, I have a decent idea. In most cases, it probably doesn't matter, but I can see it causing a miscommunication in some circumstances.

[1] Side question: what's the accepted plural of emoji in English? "Emojis" looks wrong to me, but I suspect that's because I speak a little Japanese.

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> "Emojis" looks wrong to me, but I suspect that's because I speak a little Japanese.

Yep, I prefer "emoji" given the zero plural in Japanese.

I don't think there's a consensus though. For example, Apple uses "emoji" [1], Emojipedia uses "emojis" [2], and the OED includes both [3].

[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211808#145

[2]: https://blog.emojipedia.org/first-look-217-new-emojis-in-ios...

[3]: https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/389343

If a word is borrowed from another language and becomes common place, you can use the plural form of your language. Do you say “5 pizzas“ or “5 pizze“? A notable exception are Latin words, e.g. index -> indices (if you want oto sound well educated).

The japanese plural of “emoji“ would be “emoji“ (they have no plural form)

EDIT: I'm not saying it's wrong to use the native plural form, though!

English has several nouns that don't change in their plural form: fish, sheep, aircraft, species, etc. Often this is because the originating language had no special plural form. I would therefore say that "emoji" is the correct pluralization of "emoji" in english.

Is that really a big issue? Most of the standard emoji look the same pretty much everywhere.

I think we can use the 'sheep' plural strategy here. There are, after all, rather a lot of emoji out there.

-tachi could stand in for an English-style suffixed plural, but emojitachi sounds super weird.

IIRC that's not actually pluralization, it's more like "and the rest of the group".

Both are used[1].

TL;DR: due to the influence of Japanese, it seems that most people who are familiar with Japanese will use its default form -i. As this loan word starts to become more prominent in the English language, the classic plural form -s should gain in popularity, such as it has been the case with ninjas or haikus.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/whats...

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