emoji (n.)
An emoji is a picture character used in a message. Its name is Japanese: e means picture, and moji means character. The word has no etymological connection to the English emotion.1
Emoji were used on Japanese mobile phones before they became familiar around the world. Different phone companies had their own sets and their own ways of encoding them. A symbol sent from one network could fail to appear as intended on another.2
Unicode brought many of those characters into a common standard in 2010. A word from Japanese phones now names pictures that can travel between devices almost anywhere.2
She ended the message with a laughing emoji.