Hacker News Reader

Comment by baz00 | Hacker News Reader

I think it's a little unfair to attribute it to Microsoft and MSN Messenger as it was a concept that originated on Japanese phones AFAIK.

Also Microsoft's emojis are currently the worst by a mile out of the big tech companies.

View on HN

The invention in Japan, Europe, and the US of smileys was relatively concurrent, which makes sense because by the late 90s, text-art faces (e.g. ":-)" "(^_^)") were prevalent.

Emoji specifically (絵文字, where 絵 means "picture") are a Japanese invention. They were / are custom pictures, initially monochrome, which Japanese mobile phones allowed to insert into texts.

See https://www.global.ntt/contributing-society-emoji.html

They are not the "smiley" / "emoticon" character art stuff like :-) or =ò.ó= or whatever.

Yes, the first things called "emoji" (a Japanese word) appeared (unsurprisingly) in Japan.

Custom monochrome pictures that can be put inline with text date at least back to ATASCII and PETSCII on Atari and Commodore 8-bit machines respectively.

MSN Messenger had pictures that could also be put into text (they were called smileys, but included plenty of non-face pictures), this happened the same year as NTT DoCoMo launched emoji in i-mode; yes the J-Phone had them in 1997, but it wasn't super popular.

I'm fairly sure ICQ had a handful of smileys in 1996

Yeah, that table in the link contain 176 characters that begins with weather symbols, of which five are faces in second to last row - nine if I include snowman, googly eyes(Slack/GitHub "ack" icon), dog and cat faces. That's mere 3%(5%) of already small set, vs page after pages of trivially distinct human flesh in Apple Emoji.

You're using the Japanese term to obscure. Emoticons were invented first and they are both character based and image based.

Later, people started using the term "emojis" for image emoticons and now some people say only text emoticons are real emoticons.

Just for reference, the Japanese term for emoticons is kaomoji (“face characters”), distinct from emoji.

Image emoticons did exist (every 2000s IM app and social media site had them), but largely died off with the popularization of Japanese emoji.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37235639

Web forums like UBB already had what we called "smilies" in 1998 with graphical emotive faces you could include in your posts, so that concept of image emotes predates the Japanese emoji.

Making them part of the OS and character set so they could be used anywhere and not just on a web forum was what made them the emoji we know today, and what caused them to catch on.

But now services like Slack and Mastodon have what they call "custom emoji" which hijacks the term and takes us back to 1998 web forums again.

You’re repeating the word “emote”, but “emoji” has no etymological connection to “emote” or “emotion”, it just means “picture character” in Japanese.

I know that, but it's not relevant to the point. The whole article is talking about smiles and emotions conveyed in text, so that's the context.

The name doesn't matter. Forum smilies also had a bunch of non-faces/emotions (my favorite was the "stink lizard" - still not sure what that was supposed to convey) but they're not interesting to the discussion.

i strongly suspect that the reason we call them "emojis" rather than "smilies" is due to the "emo" in "emoji". 100% of english speakers without any japanese knowledge associate the "emo" in "emoji" with "emotion"

> Making them part of the OS and character set so they could be used anywhere and not just on a web forum was what made them the emoji we know today, and what caused them to catch on.

That's not quite right. The Unicode emoji we use today are directly descendant from the emoji that were on Japanese phones.

That's how emoji ended up on our keyboard: Apple added them to the Japanese iPhone keyboard to be compatible with Japanese carriers; users in the west discovered this and started enabling Japanese input on their phones to use them; finally they became so popular that Apple (and Samsung etc.) also enabled them for non-Japanese keyboards.

If not for the original Japanese emoji, chances are that every website would still have their own smileys, instead of there being a single, interoperable set.

That's the point I was clumsily trying to make.

But now that "custom emoji" on sites like Slack and Mastodon are a thing, the term "emoji" is losing it's meaning and reverting to meaning the same thing we had before.

Yeah the original way to get emojis on iPhone was to go in and enable a keyboard hidden among the Japanese category of languages in settings. While apps existed that just basically gave directions for how to enable that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com