"Emoji"

       I learned today the name "emoji" was given by Shigetaka Kurita to the pictographs he was designing almost two decades ago.  The images were meant to replace Japanese words for cell-phone users increasingly communicating with text messages.

       The Museum of Modern Art in New York yesterday announced Kurita's original 176 emojis will be added to its collection.

       David Pierson's L.A. Times article notes:


       "Just last year, the Oxford English Dictionary declared a yellow face crying tears of joy as its word of the year. . . .

       "Today, a group called the Unicode Consortium vets new emojis and standardizes them so they can be used across different operating systems. . . .

       "In 2013, a group of 800 volunteers translated Moby Dick into emojis."


       "Emoji" is singular and plural; "emojis" is also correct.  The word's from Japanese denoting "picture character."