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All About Emoji
Emoji are the ideograms or smileys used in Japanese electronic messages and webpages, the use of which is spreading outside Japan
Originally meaning pictograph, the word emoji literally means "picture" (e) + "character" (moji)
The characters are used much like ASCII emoticons or kaomoji, but a wider range is provided, and the icons are standardized and built into the handsets
Some emoji are very specific to Japanese culture, such as a bowing (apologizing) businessman, a face wearing a face mask, a white flower used to denote "brilliant homework" or a group of emoji representing popular foods: ramen noodles, dango, onigiri, Japanese curry, and sushi
The three main Japanese operators, NTT DoCoMo, au, and SoftBank Mobile (formerly Vodafone), have each defined their own variants of emoji.
Although originally only available in Japan, some emoji character sets have been incorporated into Unicode, allowing them to be used elsewhere as well
As a result, some phones such as the Windows Phone and the iPhone lines allow access to the symbols without requiring a Japanese carrier
Emoji have also started appearing in emailing services such as Gmail (accessed via Google Labs) in April 2009 and websites such as Flipnote Hatena
Apple's Mac OS X operating system supports emoji as of version 10.7 Lion with the Apple Color Emoji typeface.
Android devices support emoji differently depending on the operating system version
Google added native emoji support to the Google Keyboard in November 2013 for devices running Android 4.4 and later
Emoji is also supported by the Google Hangouts application (independent of the keyboard in use), in both hangout and SMS modes
Several third-party messaging and keyboard applications (such as SwiftKey) for Android operating system phones also provide plugins that allow the use of emoji.