How to enable the Emoji Keyboard on iOS

First off, what are emoji? The word 'emoji' comes from Japanese and it means "picture" (e) + "character" (moji) - source. They represent ideograms or smileys and are in a way similar with the ASCII emoticons. They first emoji were created in 1998 in Japan and became popular in the Western world after Apple introduced them to Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and afterwards in iOS powered devices. Microsoft also added support for the full Unicode Emoji characters in Windows 8.

On iPhones, iPads and iPods Touch emoji can be used if you're running iOS 5 or newer. iOS 5 brought native support for emoji, which means no jailbreaking or 3rd party apps are required.

How can you tell if your iOS device supports emoji? Simply have a look below. Do you see a bunny, a snake, and a dolphin? No, this is not "A bunny, a snake, and a dolphin walk into a bar" type of post :).

🐰 🐍 🐬

If you only see 3 squares, then you're out of luck unless if you can upgrade your iOS device to at least iOS 5.

Another way to check for emoji support is by going to http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji#Emoji_characters on your iOS device browser, Safari. If you see emoticons there, it means your device supports them.

But how to actually use them in your messages, WhatsApp conversations, or any other text field on your phone? For this you need to enable the emoji keyboard on your iOS device by following these simple steps below:

1. Open the Settings app

2. Go to General then Keyboard

3. Tap on Keyboards

4. Tap Add New Keyboard and scroll to Emoji, then select it

5. That's it. Now every time your Keyboard pops-up you'll notice a globe on the left of the space key. Tap on it until the Emoji chars appear then you're good to go.

The Unicode Emoji set will see some improvements over time as Apple confirmed that it is working on adding emoticons representing black people.