Emoji vs emoticon vs kaomoji
They all add feeling to text, but “emoji,” “emoticon” and “kaomoji” are three different things with different origins. Here's how to tell them apart.
Emoticon
An emoticon is made from regular punctuation — :-), ;), :( — read by tilting your head. It dates to the early 1980s on bulletin boards and predates emoji by over a decade. It's just ASCII characters.
Emoji
An emoji is an actual pictographic character encoded in Unicode — 😀, 🔥, 🍕. It originated in late-1990s Japan (“emoji” means “picture character”) and went global when phones adopted the Unicode emoji set. Each is a real code point, not punctuation.
Kaomoji
Kaomoji are Japanese-style “face characters” built from a wider set of Unicode symbols and read upright, without tilting: (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. They're more elaborate than Western emoticons and use many characters.
Frequently asked questions
Is a smiley an emoji or emoticon?
:-) typed from punctuation is an emoticon; 😀 as a single pictographic character is an emoji.
What is kaomoji?
Japanese-style faces made from many Unicode characters, read upright — like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.