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by Zikes 3659 days ago
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