You’ve probably wondered why is it that some people refer to emojis as emoticons, and if there is a real difference between these two. It’s no wonder people often use both terms to refer to the same thing, those small icons that we have included in our keyboard set. Well, there is a difference between these two, and once you read it, you’ll never refer to emojis as emoticons, and vice versa. As far as we’re considered, they do have some similarities, but as you’ll realize in the following section, emoticon are in a way the ancestors. So let’s take a road of knowledge and learn something new.
Emoticons
Once upon a time, e-mail was limited to 250 characters, and as you could imagine, given the similar issue we all face today on Twitter, people just couldn’t express the message itself in a correct manner, and if you ask us, well with Twitter we’d just tell them to send another e-mail, or something like that. Well, you must understand that it just couldn’t work, not at that particular time, as back then this new way of communicating wasn’t used by Donald Trump to make us laugh, or by Chrissy Teigen to share yet another perk of being John Legend’s wife. No, back in a day e-mail was used to correspond with your business partners, and to close some real deals, so imagine the suffering of this one. So, people came up with something else, they used different set of keyboard characters to mimic different expressions. Sounds familiar? You’ve probably used it before, until real emojis came to play, and we understand, it may not be necessary to know the actual name when using one of these, and now you know what does the term emoticon stands for.
Emojis
Unlike emoticons that were used way before, emojis present us with something way different, and with something that will most definitely make us wonder how it is that Shigetaka Kurita came up with the small pictographs back in 1990. Well, there’s just something about emojis, and in case you’ve wondered, there always will be, as emojis are far advanced version of emoticons, and we can all agree that in a way they are the next step in the evolution, as emoticons were at the times quite hard to understand, emojis on the other hand were something that we couldn’t have mistaken for a set of characters, and while the history made sure some of use still use emoticons, especially if you belong to the old generations, the fact is that even the first edition of emojis that were only 12 pixels, are something that changed the world as we know it, and made the expression of feelings far easier. While emoticons were sometimes hard to understand, and you could easily get lost among all those dots and punctuation marks, the emoji collection is something far more advanced and with Unicode making it something universal, it surely is far better option for everyone.
In conclusion, these two options were something that definitely changed the way we communicate, and something that definitely made the history, from the dots to the icons, and who knows what shall come next, this is definitely something that we should get used to, as it will most likely remain in the common language, and who knows one day soon, may as well be recognized as an universal one, so there will be no confusion when it comes to figuring out what people really mean when they send these little icons while chatting or corresponding with you.