Emojis vs Emoticons
May 31, 2025
Have you ever wondered what emojis are and why they’ve almost replaced emoticons?
Let’s start with emoticons and it looks like they’re pretty old, by tech standards, first mentioned in this email, 43 years ago:
19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>
I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:
:-)
Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use
:-(
Emoticons are combination characters, ASCII first, then Unicode and they take up a byte per each character
Although text based and monochrome, IM applications usually assigned them a pictogram. For the nostalgia people here are some samples for :):
| Yahoo Messenger | MSN Messenger |
|---|---|
 |  |
Emojis originated in Japan in 1999, when NTT Docomo released the original pack of 176 emojis. They are also characters, but unlike emoticons where the combination of characters make up the “joke”, emojis are standalone, being assigned a single Unicode code point for each rendered image
They also differ in design depending on the font used:
Emojis can also take up a lot of space, even though they are being assigned a single Unicode Code Point:
This one for example takes up 35 bytes:
And lastly, you can combine emojis but not quite like emoticons where they will appear as separate character:
And that’s enough for a first article.