Emoji is a Japanese word, and it has nothing to do with emotion (絵文字)

Emoji (絵文字) is a Japanese word: 絵 (e), picture, plus 文字 (moji), character. A picture character. It looks as if it came from “emotion” or “emoticon”, but that’s pure coincidence. The word, and the first emoji, came from Japan.

What the kanji say

絵 (e, or kai) means a picture or a painting: 絵本 (ehon) is a picture book. The 糸 on its left is thread, and in Chinese the character could also mean embroidery in five colours, pictures made with thread. 会 on the right gives the sound.

文 (bun, or mon) began as a person with a pattern painted or tattooed on the chest. From “pattern” it came to mean writing, a sentence and literature: 文学 (bungaku) is literature.

字 (ji) means a written character, as in 漢字 (kanji), “Han characters”. It’s 子, a child, under 宀, a roof; here the child mainly gives the sound.

Together, 文字 (moji) means letters or written characters. Its older reading was monji, and moji grew out of it.

Nothing to do with emotion

Emoji and emoticon look related, and both brighten up a message, but they’re different words for different things. An emoticon, from English “emotion” and “icon”, is a face typed with ordinary keyboard characters. An emoji is e + moji: a little picture that works like a letter. Japanese has its own word for typed faces like (^_^): 顔文字 (kaomoji), “face characters”.

Where emoji came from

The first emoji sets were made by Japanese mobile phone companies in the late 1990s. In 1997 J-Phone, later part of SoftBank, sold a phone with 90 small black-and-white emoji. The set that became famous was designed by Shigetaka Kurita for NTT Docomo’s i-mode service in 1999: 176 tiny, brightly coloured pictures. In 2016 the Museum of Modern Art in New York added Kurita’s original set to its collection.

In 2010 emoji were added to Unicode, the standard that lets phones and computers everywhere show the same characters, and the Japanese word travelled around the world with them.

How to use it

• 絵文字を使いすぎだよ。

  Emoji o tsukaisugi da yo.

  You use way too many emoji.

• この絵文字、かわいいね。

  Kono emoji, kawaii ne.

  This emoji is cute.

• 文字が小さくて読めない。

  Moji ga chiisakute yomenai.

  The writing's too small to read.

• 名前を漢字で書いてください。

  Namae o kanji de kaite kudasai.

  Please write your name in kanji.

• In Japanese, 絵文字 are the little pictures, and 顔文字 are faces made from punctuation.
• The big stickers in messaging apps are called スタンプ (sutanpu), “stamps”, not emoji.
• It’s three short syllables: e-mo-ji.

Words with the same kanji

Remember it

A picture (絵) that learned to write (文字): a little face that sits in a sentence like a letter.

The kanji in this lesson

Tap Draw it to watch the stroke order. Numbers show where each stroke starts.

Draw it

Draw it

Draw it

Sources

• Wiktionary via Kaikki: 絵文字
• Wikipedia: Emoji
• Wiktionary via Kaikki: 文 (glyph origin)

Written by the Sumi team with the help of AI, then checked against JMdict and KANJIDIC2. How we write lessons. Spotted a mistake? Email brightsmilesolutionssupport@gmail.com.