Emoji

A Emoji [ emodʑi ] (Japanese絵 文字orえもじimage character ) is an ideogram that replaces long terms, especially in SMS and chats.

Demarcation to emoticons

Due to the similar sound Emojis are often confused with emoticons, especially since their function and handling are largely identical. Emojis but are conceptually broader than emoticons and other than these are not limited to emotions, but also for common terms like plants ( 🌴 ) and animals ( 🐫 ), Essen ( 🍇 ) and drink ( 🍸 ) or weather conditions ( 🌂 ) used. That part of the Emojis intended for expressing emotional states and most likely corresponds to the western smileys is called Kaomoji (Japanese颜 文字orかおもじface character ); if the characters are animated, as Kaoani (Japanese顔 アニfacial animation and animated avatar ), or generally just short as Kao (Japanese颜face).

History

The invention of the Emojis is attributed Shigetaka Kurita, who has worked for DoCoMo late 90s on i-mode project. Although today Emojis are comparatively large, detailed and colored, the skills former mobile phones, the first Emojis were adequately reflected monochromatic and of only 12 × 12 pixels on a side and therefore subject to lack of originality not to copyright. This allowed other Japanese phone companies to make their own devices also Emoji enabled and thus enabled a rapid market penetration.

Coding

Shift_JIS

Emojis were in a free area of Shift_JIS encoding ( F89F to F9FC ). However, initially there was no uniform coding across manufacturers, so that different variants have been established over time. Goods at the beginning only 176 Emojis defined, their number increased by 2010 to 722 In addition to the DoCoMo version has particular KDDI and Softbank variant a certain widespread.

Unicode

Only with the inclusion of Emojis in Unicode 6.0 in October 2010, the basis for a globally consistent coding was created. At this time, Unicode in the blocks Basic Latin (in conjunction with combining diacritical marks for symbols), Latin -1 Supplement General Punctuation characters like symbols, arrows, Various technical character, Sealed alphanumeric characters, Geometric Shapes, Miscellaneous Symbols, Dingbats, Extra arrows -B, Miscellaneous Symbols and arrows, CJK Symbols and Punctuation enclosed CJK characters and months, Mahjonggsteine ​​, Additional enclosed alphanumeric characters and additional enclosed CJK characters already contained a total of 114 characters, also known as Emojis use find, was it apart, take the Emojis as a single block new in Unicode. Instead, the remaining Emojis were distributed to the existing blocks Various technical character, Miscellaneous Symbols, Dingbats, Additional enclosed alphanumeric characters and additional enclosed CJK characters, and the new blocks game cards, Various pictographic symbols, smileys and transport and map symbols. Overall Unicode thus contains 722 Emojis.

Display options

Some characters can be displayed as colored and possibly animated emoji as well as a regular part of the text. Therefore, these alternatives were formally standardized in Unicode 6.1 at 214 characters: means of the so-called Variantenselektoren an application can now clearly decide whether Emojis to be depicted in the style of the rest of the text or images. Follows an emoji character of Variantenselektor U FE0E, so is the sign to represent the style of the rest of the text, follows instead U FE0F so, however, the Emoji style should be used.

Whether the browser Emojis is correct, can be checked by the following example: The anchor mark ( ⚓, U 2693 ) once in the text style ( ⚓ ︎, U 2693 U FE0E ) and once in Emoji style ( ⚓ ️, U 2693 U FE0F ). See both versions the same, so the browser supports either generally or specifically but the font style used no discrimination by Variantenselektor for Emojis.

Regional indicators

A special form of Emojis are the regional indicators (U 1 F1E6 to U 1 F1FF ) enclosed from the Block Additional alphanumeric characters: These are sequences of two characters, the country codes in accordance with ISO correspond 3166-1 ALPHA - 2, for example 🇩 🇪 (U 1 F1E9 U 1 F1EA ) for Germany. It remains the application to decide whether it represents this country codes as Letters ( DE) or a symbol such as a flag of the corresponding area () or as its stylized outline ().