emoji

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for emoji is 5 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ɪˈməʊdʒi/. Corpus data places it at rank #21,508 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "A digital graphic icon with a unique code point used to represent a concept, object, person, animal or place, originally used in Japanese text messaging but since adopted internationally in other c...".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for emoji, with forms such as "emjoi", "emmoji", and "emoij". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 1 confusable-pair relationship, "emo", where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Borrowed from Japanese 絵文字(えもじ) (emoji), from 絵(え) (e, “picture”) + 文字(もじ) (moji, “character”). False cognate of English emotion and emoticon, but the coincidental phonetic resemblance may have facilitated its adoption into English.https://www.google.co.uk/… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is emoji, spelled E-M-O-J-I, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.