Difference Between Emoji and Emoticons

Invented multiple times over human history, its internet-era genesis is widely considered to have occurred in September 1982, when computer scientist Scott Fahlman suggested to the Carnegie Mellon University message board that :-) and :-( could be used to distinguish jokes from serious statements online. Shortly thereafter came the name, a portmanteau of the phrase “emotion icon”.


Emoticons and multiple similar methods of portraying emotion in text have been recorded throughout history, but emoticons as we know it were invented, according to most sources, in 1982 by Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist, who used emoticons such as a sad face or smiley face could be used to distinguish jokes from serious statements on his university's online message board. The actual etymology of the word emoticon is a merging of the words emotion and icon; Emoticon.


Emoji were created in the late 1990s by NTT DoCoMo, the Japanese communications firm. The name is a contraction of the words e and moji, which roughly translates to pictograph.


Unlike emoticons, emoji are actual pictures. Where as emoticons were invented to portray emotion in environments where nothing but basic text is available, emoji are actually extensions to the character set used by Unicode, the most widely used text system on modern OS's, and can be found widely used on social media sites such as Facebook, and on nearly all modern smartphones and similar devices.









http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/06/difference-between-emoji-and-emoticons-explained

http://whatjapanthinks.com/2007/09/19/turns-25-but-how-old-are-japanese-emoticons/





Asteroff, Janet (1987). Paralanguage in Electronic Mail: A Case Study. (Ph.D.). Columbia University.