Emoji has an assumed association with the word emotion, however, the word emotion is not the base of emoji. Emoticons, the precursor to the emoji, is a combination of the word emotion and icon, which could be part of the reason that the word emotion is associated with emoji. Emoji is formed from the combination of two Japanese characters. The character for picture is verbally expressed “e” and the character for letter or written character is  verbally expressed “moji”; together, they form “emoji” (Berdard, 2018).

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Emoji are “12x12 pixel images that are displayed on digital devices and platforms as a single character of in-line text” (Berdard, 2018). The first collection of emoji consisted of 674 characters and is now up to 1,742. There is an average of sixty emoji added each year.  Emoji are supported on a variety of platforms and each platform has a distinct aesthetic; the look of each emoji is not consistent across platforms. Emoji are categorized into ten groupings: “Smileys and Emotions”, “People and Body”, “Component”, “Animals and Nature”, “Food and Drink”, “Travel and Places”, “Activities”, “Objects”, “Symbols”, and “Flags” (Unicode, 2019). Some sets of emoji come in multiple variations to reflect gender and skin tones. The skin tones are based off of the Fitzpatrick Scale.