WHEELING, Ill.—Laura Ustick was fiddling with her phone at a bar on a Friday night when she noticed a glaring hole in the phone's lexicon of emojis—those pictogram-like characters that some people ignore and others have adopted as a second language.

There are emojis for ice cream, puppies, cars, pizza and sushi, but not for the all-American hot dog.

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"People are demanding a hot-dog emoji," said the third-generation general manager of Superdawg Drive-In, which has been serving up hot dogs since 1948. "It's a slight against the hot-dog community."

Emoji symbols, which began with Japanese mobile phones and spread to smartphones in recent years, have become a lingua franca for certain users of texting and social media. Emojis allow people to punctuate their texts with hundreds of colorful images ranging from a skyscraper to a martini glass to a pig's snout.