Picture writing
The word emoji is Japanese: e means picture and moji means character. It has nothing to do with the English word “emotion”, although many people think so. Kurita's original set is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Unicode
Once emoji made it into Unicode and onto the iPhone, they spread all over the world. Each manufacturer draws them a little differently, so the same smiley can look different on another phone.
Word of the year
In 2015 the Oxford Dictionaries named the 😂 emoji its word of the year. Every year the Unicode Consortium approves new ones, such as flags, foods, and people of different professions and skin tones.