[nutheracc]

Well now I have to ask... Presumably that's ascii art, and :) is an emoji. And :-) is also an emoji. So how many characters/rows before an emoji becomes ascii art? Also, I take it emoji is the ascii, and emoticon is the image. Also, emoji sounds plural to me - I take it it's not.

[sirn]

In Japanese, they call ASCII-art style smiley and a pictogram separately. The ASCII-art one is "kaomoji" (where kao means "face" and "moji" is letter) while the pictogram is strictly an emoji (where "e" means "picture").

Of course, one could argue that since the word is now being used internationally, it's not necessary for them to be interpret in the same way as its roots.

[huxley]

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is a type of emoticon referred to as kaomoji common in Asia (and now worldwide), but like the happy face :-) it is an emoticon (kaomoji use a wider character set than the ASCII commonly used in Western emoticons)

Emoji is a Japanese loan word 絵文字 (literally picture character), you can read more about them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji

Emoji in English can used as a singular or plural word but you can also write emojis.

[hamms]

You have it backwards: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, :), and :-) are all examples of emoticons. Emoji are the images.

[Sylos]

Emoji are the images that you often see spammed all over the place: , , , , , ... And "Emoji" is actually plural. "Emojis" is sometimes used as plural, but it's actually wrong.

Emoticons are then usually made up out of multiple ASCII-symbols, although general Unicode is by now also in use: :), :-), :|, :[ ...

And then for the "ㄟ(ツ)ㄏ"-Emoticon, you can get more specific about it and call it "Kaomoji". Kaomoji are not Emoji, even though the two sound related, and are actually a more horizontal style of Emoticons, so basically any Emoticon which you can read without turning your head: ㄟ(ツ)ㄏ, ^^, (っ´▽`)っ, (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻, ఠ_ఠ ...

[Zikes]

An emoji is the name for an image/drawing which represents a single specific unicode character, not a series of characters. The name comes from Japanese e (絵, "picture") + moji (文字, "character") [1]

Multi-character ones would be called smileys, emotes, or emoticons. The confusion comes from the fact that many messengers will automatically replace multi-character emotes with an emoji.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji

[tantalor]

The term emoticon refers to a series of text characters (typically punctuation or symbols) that is meant to represent a facial expression or gesture (sometimes when viewed sideways), such as ;-).

Emoticons predate Unicode and emoji, but were later adapted to include Unicode characters.

http://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Emoticons

[dghughes]

All I know is in the mid 90s on IRC we called a :) an emoticon.

[cptskippy]

Those aren't emoji, they're emoticons.

[dllthomas]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji