emoji

noun

Etymology: Borrowed from Japanese 絵文字(えもじ) (emoji), from 絵(え) (e, “picture”) + 文字(もじ) (moji, “character”). False cognate of English emotion and emoticon.

1. A digital graphic icon with a unique code point used to represent a concept, object, person, animal or place, originally used in Japanese text messaging but since adopted internationally in other contexts such as social media. Or, by extension, any non-standard emoji-like image inserted inline in text, i.e. an image emoticon.

   “In order to communicate quickly, many mobile phone users use emoji characters (similar to emoticons) while sending messages. Service providers have also created a set of emoji characters and have added support for it.”

   “One of the most exciting announcements at Twitter's Chirp conference this week was "Annotated Tweets". […] The data attached doesn't have to be simple text. Twitter suggests examples such as MIDI data (for music) or emoji (for fancy emoticons).”