From: Don't know the difference between emoji and emoticons? Let me explain
Invented circa 1982,
An emoticon is a typographic display of a facial representation, used to convey emotion in a text only medium. Like so:
;-)
The name is a contraction of the words e and moji, which roughly translates to pictograph.
Unlike emoticons, emoji are actual pictures … emoji are actually extensions to the character set used by most operating systems today, Unicode.
In essence, emoji are treated by the computer as letters from a non-western language
that also means that the software has to explicitly support them – otherwise it is forced to display a placeholder icon, or even just a blank space
each company has to provide its own interpretations of what the emoji descriptions should actually look like – and they don’t always agree.
Most are filed under “Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs”, but the emoji which depict emotive faces are separated out as “emoticons”.
Japanese twist on emoticons, which use of the Japanese character set.
Some apps refer to them as emoji, but they’re fully specific to the app, and can’t be cut and paste anywhere else except when they’re treated as an image