The word "emoji" comes from which language?

The word “emoji” comes from Japanese. It combines e, meaning “picture,” with moji, meaning “character” or “letter,” from the Japanese term 絵文字.

The name is often mistakenly linked to the English words “emotion” or “emoticon” because emoji frequently express feelings and the sounds are similar. That resemblance is coincidental. In English, an emoticon is usually made from punctuation or keyboard characters, such as :-) , while an emoji is a pictorial character encoded for digital text.

Modern emoji emerged in Japan during the late 1990s. Shigetaka Kurita designed an early set of 176 icons for NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode mobile internet service in 1999. Their spread beyond Japan accelerated when major technology companies adopted emoji and Unicode standardized them for cross-platform communication. Unicode generally uses “emoji” as both singular and plural, although “emojis” is also common in English.