Key Difference: The primary difference between an emoji and an emoticon is the fact that while an emoticon is created out of text, primarily via the use of punctuation marks, whereas an emoji is a small image, a pictograph.

Nearly everyone has used an emoji and emoticon at least once in their lives, even if they didn’t know what it was called. In common parlance, the terms are used interchangeably, though that is incorrect. There is a clear difference between the two, even if most people either don’t know or don’t care.

An emoji is intended to be a graphical representation of a human face. In fact the term itself means pictograph, and is derived from Japanese, originally meaning e (絵, "picture") + moji (文字, "character").

Most people incorrectly refer to emojis as smileys, however it should be noted that a smiley specifically refers a stylized representation of a smiling humanoid face that is typically yellow in color. An emoji, on the other hand, can represent various expressions; in fact, they are not even limited to human faces. Practically anything can be an emoji, including but not limited to facial expressions, common objects, places and types of weather, and animals. Some modern emojis also include words or numbers that are stylistically written.