Re: Who invented the term "emoji", and why?
The font of all definintive knowledge, Wikipedia, has a page explaining this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji
Emoticons, originating with the ascii smileys, were generally to depict emotions. Emojis are essentially just pictures, which is kind of reverse evolotion for many languages but not incorrect as such because it's the nature of languages that they change.