Comment by hnbad

"Emoticon" refered to symbol combinations. "Emoji" only arrived on the scene in the English-speaking world via Unicode. I think I've heard both terms being used to refer to kaomojis (CJK symbol combinations) before that but I'm not sure. The only change I'm aware of is that smileys already present in Unicode via extended ASCII are now sometimes also referred to as "emojis" although they technically aren't. They were never called emoticons though and emoticons are generally not called "emojis".