iPhone Emoji Keyboard – How to Enable and Use Emoji Keyboard for iPhone

Updated Dec 20,2016 | by Niko

Emoji has become increasingly popular around the world since its international inclusion in Apple's iPhone (originally in iOS 5). We will discuss how to enable and use iPhone emoji keyboard in the following article.

What Does Emoji Mean

Emoji is a kind of ideogram and smiley that originate on Japanese mobile phones in the late 1990s. It becomes popular and sweeps the world since Apple includes it as the built-in feature in its devices. In addition to Apple, Android, Windows phones and other operating systems support emoji, and now it is widely used in a variety of phone messages and social networking. The popular emoji characters include facial expressions, food, places, sports, weather types, animals and much more.  

What is worth mentioning, Oxford Dictionaries named “Face With Tears of Joy” emoji character as the 2015 Word of the year. It said that 2015 has seen a sizable increase in the use of the word “emoji” and recognized its impact on popular culture.

iPhone Emoji Keyboard

Due to the international inclusion in Apple’s system and devices, emoji becomes famous and popular worldwide. iPhone emoji keyboard let you bring words to life, so how to enable iPhone emoji keyboard?

How to Enable iPhone Emoji Keyboard

Generally, emoji keyboard is included by default. If you do not see the emoji keyboard, you can enable it manually. To enable iPhone emoji keyboard, go to Settings > General > Keyboard > Keyboards > tap Add New Keyboard > Emoji.

How to Use iPhone Emoji Keyboard

With iPhone emoji keyboard, you can add emoji characters when you send messages, mails, posts or whatever. How to use iPhone emoji keyboard to add emoji characters?

Add emojis

1. tap the smile face icon in the lower left corner and switch to iPhone emoji keyboard

2. swipe left or right to view and choose more emojis; tap  to see emojis that you’ve used recently; tap and hold an emoji to change the skin tone of certain emoji

3. tap to add emojis

Tap to replace words with emojis

This great feature is available for iOS 10 users, if you want to use it in Messages app, then upgrade to iOS 10 first.

1. go to Messages, and start a new message or tap on an existing message

2. tap the smile face icon  on your keyboard, and the words will turn orange

3. tap the orange words to replace them with emojis

Predictive Emoji

When you write a message, you will see suggestions for emojis you may need. If the predictive emoji is what you want, then you can tap to add this emoji.

To disable predictive text or emoji, tap and hold  or , swipe the slider next to Predictive.

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