Emoji

Emoji (絵文字^?) is the Japanese term for the picture characters or emoticons used in Japanese electronic messages and webpages. Originally meaning pictograph, the word literally means e "picture" + moji "letter". The characters are used much like emoticons elsewhere, but a wider range is provided, and the icons are standardized and built into the handsets. Some emoji are very specific to Japanese culture, such as a bowing (apologizing) businessman, a face wearing a face mask or a group of emoji representing popular foods (ramen noodles, dango, onigiri, Japanese curry, sushi). The three main Japanese operators, NTT DoCoMo, au and SoftBank Mobile (formerly Vodafone), have each defined their own variants of emoji.

Although typically only available in Japan, the characters and code required to use emoji are, thanks to the nature of software development, often present in many phones' software. As a result, some phones, such as the Apple iPhone, allow access to the symbols without requiring a Japanese operator. Emoji have also started appearing in emailing services such as Gmail (accessed via Google Labs) in April 2009^[1] and websites such as Flipnote Hatena. Several SMS applications for Android powered phones now^[when?] also provide plugins that allow the use of Emoji. Apple's Mac OS X operating system supports emoji as of version 10.7 (Lion).

Legacy encoding of Emoji

For NTT DoCoMo's i-mode, each emoji symbol is drawn on a 12x12 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. The basic specification has 176 symbols, with 76 more added in phones that support C-HTML 4.0.

au's emoji pictograms are specified using the IMG tag. SoftBank Mobile emojis are wrapped between SI/SO escape sequences, and support colors and animation. DoCoMo's emoji are the most compact to transmit while au's version is more flexible based on open standards.

Emoji in the Unicode standard

Hundreds of Emoji characters were encoded in the Unicode Standard in version 6.0 released in October 2010 (and in the related international standard ISO/IEC 10646). The additions, originally requested by Google (Kat Momoi, Mark Davis, and Markus Scherer wrote the first draft for consideration by the Unicode Technical Committee in August 2007) and Apple Inc. (whose Yasuo Kida and Peter Edberg joined the first official UTC proposal for 607 characters as coauthors in January 2009), went through a long series of commenting by members of the Unicode Consortium and national standardization bodies of various countries participating in ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2, especially the United States, Germany, Ireland (led by Michael Everson), and Japan; various new characters (especially symbols for maps and European signs) were added during the consensus-building process.

The core emoji set as of Unicode 6.0 consists of 722 characters, of which 114 characters map to sequences of one or more characters in the pre-6.0 Unicode standard, and the remaining 608 characters map to sequences of one or more characters introduced in Unicode 6.0.^[2] There is no block specifically set aside for emoji – the new symbols were encoded in seven different blocks (some newly created), and there exists a Unicode data file called EmojiSources.txt that includes mappings to and from the Japanese vendors' legacy character sets.

A set of Regional Indicator Symbols were defined as part of this set of characters as an alternative to encoding separate characters for national flags.

Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs[1] Unicode.org chart (PDF)
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