Express Yourself Better by Using Emojis On Your iPhone And iPad !

The Difference Between Emojis and Emoticons

Emojis 😃 and emoticons 🙂 are both ways of representing human expressions while texting online. In the early days of the internet, emojis were a more common way of representation, while as time grew emoticons became more popular. 

Emoticons

Emoticons use punctuation marks to show human expressions. For example, a colon:, represents eyes, while a bracket, ) represents a smile. To make a smiling expression, a person would type :).

Emojies:

On the other hand, emojis are graphical representations of human expressions. They are premade icons provided by the software you use to communicate with the other person.

Image source: Emoji vs. Emoticons

Both of these ways provide us a great way to showcase our emotions online while texting each other. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that a single emoji could be worth several lines of text!

But where did these little pictures that make texting so much fun come from?

Where Did Emojis Come From?

Emojis were created in 1990 by a Japanese engineer who was looking for ways in which his customers could communicate through icons. He created 176 icons and named them “Emoji,” which is a combination of the Japanese words “e” meaning picture and “moji” meaning characters. 

They have used popularly infamous messaging apps of the ’2000s, including MSN, Yahoo, and AOL Messenger.

As time progressed emojis became standardized and their number steadily increased. Now, we have more than 1800 emojis to express our feelings, and texting has become more convenient and fun than ever before!

Emoticons on MSN Messenger

But, why Do People Love Using Emojis?

It’s simple! Emoji let people convey their thoughts or feelings more expressively as compared to plain text. They offer a number of advantages:-

• Add an additional layer tone and clarity to the text messaging
• Can lighten the mood of a serious conversation 
• Help communicate ideas that can not be expressed in words

No wonder people love using emojis!

Enable Emoji On iPhone And iPad

iPhones include hundreds of emojis, all accessible and completely free. Let’s see how to enable, use and remove emoji from apple devices including iPhone or ipads. This tutorial will focus on iOS 7 or later. 

Enabling the Emoji Keyboard

To add emojis to your conversations on iPhone, you will first have to enable the emoji keyboard from your iPhone settings by following the steps given below:

Step 1: Go to “Settings > General > Keyboard.”

Step 2: This will take you to the “Keyboards” menu. Tap on “Keyboards > Add new Keyboard.”

Step 3: Scroll through the list that appears and select “Emoji” to enable it on the keyboard. It will now be available in the list of active keyboards on your iPhone.

Step 4: To see if the emoji keyboard is enabled, go to “Settings > General > Keyboard.”

You will see “Emoji” listed under your default language keyboard. This indicates that the emoji keyboard is now active, and you can use it with all apps that support emojis.

How To Use iPhone Emojis

In this section, we will first learn how you can insert emojis while texting, including how to use multiracial emojis, and then we will learn how to disable emojis as well.

Inserting Emojis

Now that you have the keyboard activated, it’s time to spice up your texts by adding emojis to them! You can do so in two ways:

1. Emoji Suggestions

Most keyboards suggest emojis based on what you’re typing. Here’s how to get an emoji suggestion:

Step 1: Type a word or phrase that has an emoji relevant to it. For example, the phrase ‘got home’.

Step 2: The keyboard will suggest the emoji associated with the word, and by tapping on it, you can quickly add it to your text.

2. Quick Scroll

Alternatively, if you want all the emojis to be displayed in front of you to choose, you can use the quick scroll method. Here’s how:

Step 1: Simply click on the smiley face or globe button (in the case of iPhone X) next to the space bar or voice button.

Step 2: This will open up the emoji menu. To browse through the emojis, you can either swipe right or select from the categories at the bottom.

Multicultural Emojis on iPhone 

To promote cultural diversity, Apple has created emojis of every color, rather than just white. Follow these steps to use them.

Step 1: Open the emoji keyboard with an app that supports iPhone emojis.

Step 2: Choose an emoji that has a single human face or hand. Tap and hold it.

Step 3: This will open a small menu with the same emoji in different skin colors. You can choose the skin color you want by tapping on it.

How To Remove The iPhone Emoji Keyboard

Sometimes we want to keep things simple by not using the emoji keyboard. If you want to disable the Emoji keyboard on your iPhone, follow these simple steps:

Step 1:

Go to “Settings > General > Keyboards.”

Step 2:

Next, click on “Keyboards” to display the list of active keyboards on your iPhone.

Step 3:

Once the list is displayed, click on “Edit” at the screen’s top right corner.

Step 4:

Tap on the red circle next to the “Emoji” option and then click on “Delete.”

Now that you know everything there is to know about iPhone emojis, you can easily enable them and use them to express yourself in a better way.

Happy texting!

For more interesting information about iPhones and iPads, check out our blog!