6 Things to Know about Emoji and Emoticons
Emojis are images used in text-based communication that express an idea or concept, and emoticons are characters or images that express an emotion. You've probably seen the smiley face emoticon? used in messages. They are often used in similar situations and the terms are often used interchangeably, but they each have a slightly different history and meaning.
Why they are popular
Using these graphics and symbols, you can express feelings such as happiness or anger, communicate concepts such as surprise, and adding more meaning to the message. Instead of providing an entire line of text to tell someone you're unhappy, a simple graphic of a frowning face tells the recipient how you feel.
Email and text messages have become a standard way to communicate. However, typing a message removes the interpersonal connection that can show moods or further communicate ideas. People are "wired" genetically to interpret facial expressions and voices. Take away the face-to-face built-in capabilities we have to understand a shout, laugh, smile, or frown, and our ability to communicate a message depends on words alone, and the experience of the writer. To be honest, while more of us use text methods of communication, not all of us are skilled at communicating emotions and context in our text. So, as a result, emoji and emoticons can be our helpers.
History of the terms.
Emoticons have been around for quite some time. The term itself is a shortened combination of "Emotion Icons." They are used to portray your emotions or moods while you are sending a message, email, in social media posts, or in any text message. Since a text-based communication doesn't provide a way to observe someone's facial expression or tone of voice, messages can be misinterpreted without this human feedback, hence, the usefulness of inserting an emoticon. A smile can change the interpretation of the message, and help the reader understand your context.
For example, a simple joke can be taken out of context unless you add a ":)" within the message, the symbolic smiley face emoticon, which helps clarify the meaning of the information. There are many ways that emoticons can be inserted from smiling to expressing tears of happiness, or even horror and disgust.
Text emoticons and images
Today, emoticons are often replaced by actual images and many text-based applications will automatically convert the symbol from text to the image. Try it sometime in an email or on your smartphone by typing a colon and right parentheses characters (with no space between them) and you might see it automatically converted to a smiley face image. While not all moods have been incorporated into these systems, the most popular emotional expressions are present. For a list, here's a link to the Wikipedia list of emoticons of emoticon text symbols.
Differences between emoji and emoticons
Emojis are different from emoticons. While an emoticon denotes your emotional state, an emoji can have a complete meaning and thought behind the picture. For example, you could use the image of a clock, bus, and school building to send a three-character message stating that it's "time to go to school."
Emojis are more around ideas rather than the emotions of the person composing the message. The use of emoji's originated in Japan, and the word emoji means "picture character." The range of emoji is broader than emoticons and includes pictures of animals, transportation, business icons, and others.
However, there are a lot of emoticons integrated into the list of emoji simply because of how incredibly popular the system for emotions had become for digital communication. Smiling, crying, laughing and angry faces can express emotions inside a group of emoji. For example, placing a smiling face before the clock in the example above to tell your reader that you are happy it's time to go to school.
Where can I use emoji and emoticons?
An international organization called Unicode (www.unicode.org) helps to maintain industry standards for characters used in text messages, websites, and mobile devices. Most major technology companies use this standard for their hardware and software, and the Unicode standard includes symbols for emoticons and emoji, which has helped to make the use of the terms interchangeable. As a result of this standard, most computers, mobile devices, websites, and software applications can use and display emoji and emoticon symbols, as long as the symbol is included in the industry standard.
For computer users, inserting and using emoticons is done using the keyboard characters for the symbols, which will usually result in the symbol appearing automatically after the space key is pressed after the last character. Another way is to use the menu option called Insert, then select Symbol. Selecting this will display the emoticon and emoji symbols you can insert with a click.
Adding emoji and emoticon symbols to a mobile device.
For mobile devices, you can usually add a set of emoji and emoticons as an additional keyboard.
For iPhone and iPad users, go to Settings, then General, then select Keyboards. Select Add New Keyboard, then look in the list for Emoji and tap it. When you use your keyboard, look to the left of the space bar for a globe symbol, tap this and you can switch between your standard keyboard and the emoji symbol keyboard.
For Android devices, the emoji keyboard is built-in in the latest version, called KitKat, which allows you to press and hold the enter or search key to access the emoji keyboard. Older Android versions will require an Emoji keyboard app for installation (there are dozens), and applications sometimes include their own emoji symbols since it hasn't been included in Android until recently.
To my way of thinking.
Emoticons and emoji are simple methods anyone can use in order to deliver a message. Whether you are trying to express a joke through text or want to send an ultra-quick pictographic sentence about your plans for after work, these images can deliver almost any message you want to write, add more expression to your communication, and can be fun to use. Who knows, you might impress your friends and family with your newfound skills!
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