Emoji Word Origins

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Sam Baker. How are you?

Hey, Sam, where are you calling us from?

I’m calling from Bowling Green, Kentucky. Miss Martha Barnette did a lecture here not too long ago, and we got to talking and figured I’d call you guys.

Well, hi, Sam. Welcome to the show.

Hey, Sam. I didn’t get a chance to see you in Kentucky, but thanks for calling us. We got into a fascinating conversation that sort of spilled over to after the discussion was over around emojis as linguistic phenomenon. And my question after the lecture, which we didn’t get to talk about, was could you all etymologize the word emoji as it’s so pervasive in texting today?

So the etymology of the word emoji, that is a really good question. And the reason it’s a good question is because lots of people misunderstand its origins.

Do you have any theories?

We sort of touched on it being Japanese, but I also have another theory that it’s more emotive. It’s coming from the word emotion, although that’s about as far as I can get.

That’s pretty close to the common theory. The common theory, people suppose without looking it up, that emoji came from the word emoticon, which stands for emotion icon, which are the old text symbols that we make with punctuation. Some of us still do. But it turns out that it’s just a coincidence that the word emoji looks a little bit like the word emoticon. It isn’t from the word emotion or emoticon or emotive or anything like that. It’s actually made up of two Japanese words. The first prefix, e, means something like picture, and emoji, M-O-J-I, means something like character. So it’s a picture character.

Right on the nose. And we borrowed it from the Japanese kind of with the symbols because they really pioneered this. Like, we always have to separate out the history of the word from the history of the idea. But before the word emoji was really used in this way, the Japanese were putting digital symbols inside digital text, kind of the same way we do now, like where you have, like, standard characters and then a picture in line with it. Long before we were, they had a system in the 1950s, even, where a bunch of newspapers got together and agreed on a baseball symbol to use when they were sending, like, the baseball scores and the baseball reporting around to all the different news outlets.

A happy baseball?

No, it’s just a baseball. It’s got a nice little circle with the stitching kind of. It’s very clearly a baseball. But that’s the 1950s, far before you would think that that kind of thing would have been happening.

Okay. So in other words, that word is divided in a different way. We divide it into emo and G, right?

Yeah, exactly. But it’s really E-moji. The other thing we should talk about, Sam, over here, do you pluralize that word? What’s your plural for emoji?

I’m just going to tack an S on at the end. That’s what I do. It’s emojis.

Yeah. We’re really seeing this kind of settle out in English since the word is relatively new where it hasn’t been conclusively decided by English speakers whether or not we’ve all agreed upon emoji as the plural because it kind of behaves like some romance languages where the plural ends in an I or if we’ve decided we’re just going to tack an S on it and make it behave more like an English plural.

Interesting. Well, if I could text you anything, it would be a head exploding. It blew my mind.

It’s good, right?

Oh, this is such a delightful thing. We’ll know in 50 years without an emoji or permanent. I wonder if they won’t just be like some of the fads of the past and just kind of like wither away to nothing. Or maybe just one or two will stick around.

Well, that’s a good question. I find myself using them more and more. My iPhone automatically fills them in. If I type cookie, I get a little picture of a cookie. I almost never use them because a few of the people I correspond with use them.

Sam, next time you have a brain buster, do give us a call. And say hi to everybody there at Western Kentucky University.

I most definitely will.

Okay. And thanks for having me on, guys.

Thanks, Sam.

Okay.

Thanks, Sam.

Bye-bye.

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