emoji：和你想的不一样

Most English speakers assume that "emoji" is related to "emotion". It makes sense: emojis are often used to show how we feel, and the two words look and sound alike. But it's a complete coincidence. "Emoji" is a Japanese word, and it has nothing to do with emotions. In Japanese, e (絵) means "picture" and moji (文字) means "character" or "letter". So an emoji is simply a "picture character". The first widely used set of emojis was created in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita, who was working for the Japanese mobile phone company NTT Docomo. At that time, messages on mobile phones were short and could only include a limited number of characters. Kurita wanted to give people a quick and simple way to share information and feelings. He designed 176 small pictures, each just 12 by 12 pixels, including a sun, an umbrella, a heart and some basic faces. His original set is now part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Emojis quickly became popular in Japan. In 2010, they were added to Unicode, the international standard that lets computers and phones around the world display the same text. Once Apple and Google included emojis on their smartphones, they spread everywhere. The word "emoji" was added to Oxford's online dictionary in 2013. Two years later, Oxford Dictionaries made a surprising choice for its Word of the Year: not a word at all, but the "Face with Tears of Joy" emoji. Today, billions of emojis are sent every day. And every one of them carries a little bit of Japanese with it.