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> Contrary to popular belief “emo-ji” doesn’t mean “emo-tional”. It’s a Japanese word that literally translates into “picture character”

TIL

More specifically, the "e" part is "picture" and the "moji" part is "character."

e (絵) + moji (文字) = emoji (絵文字)

Yes but we used to call them emoticons which was a bit clunky to pronounce so it's probably a form of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phono-semantic_matching

Interesting, I always thought it was a quirky twist on the original emoticon.