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WonderLanguage fact

'Emoji' is a Japanese word: e means 'picture' and moji means 'written character'. Its likeness to the English 'emotion' is pure coincidence, even though emoji are now used above all to show feelings.

Etymology

Language

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Emoji grew up on Japanese mobile phones in the 1990s. One of the best-known early sets was drawn in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita for NTT DoCoMo's mobile internet service: 176 small symbols for things such as weather, sport and moods, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Emoji went global after 2010, when Unicode, the standard that lets computers everywhere display the same characters, added 722 of them. The word that really does come from 'emotion' is 'emoticon', emotion plus icon, for faces typed with punctuation such as :-). The computer scientist Scott Fahlman proposed the smiley at Carnegie Mellon University in 1982. In 2015 Oxford Dictionaries chose the 'face with tears of joy' emoji as its word of the year.

Türkçe oku
“Emoji” Japonca bir sözcüktür: e “resim”, moji ise “yazı işareti, harf” demektir. Emojiler bugün en çok duygu anlatmak için kullanılsa da, İngilizcedeki “emotion” (duygu) sözcüğüne benzemesi tamamen rastlantıdır.

Emojiler 1990'larda Japon cep telefonlarında doğdu. İlk dönemin en tanınmış takımlarından birini 1999'da Shigetaka Kurita, NTT DoCoMo şirketinin mobil internet hizmeti için çizdi. Hava durumu, spor ve ruh hâlleri gibi konuları anlatan bu 176 küçük simge bugün New York'taki Modern Sanat Müzesi'nin (MoMA) koleksiyonunda. Emojilerin bütün dünyaya yayılması 2010'dan sonra oldu: O yıl Unicode, yani dünyanın her yerindeki bilgisayarların aynı karakterleri göstermesini sağlayan standart, 722 emojiyi kapsamına aldı. “Emotion” sözcüğünden gerçekten türeyen sözcük ise emotion (duygu) ile icon (simge) sözcüklerinin birleşimi olan “emoticon”dur; :-) gibi noktalama işaretleriyle yazılan yüzlere denir. Bu gülen yüzü 1982'de Carnegie Mellon Üniversitesi'nde bilgisayar bilimci Scott Fahlman önermişti. Oxford Sözlükleri 2015'te “sevinç gözyaşları döken yüz” emojisini yılın sözcüğü seçti. Türk Dil Kurumu ise emoji için “resimce” karşılığını önerir.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Emoji
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