What was life like before emojis? Actually, since I’m a millennial, I remember very clearly how we would convey our emotions over text. 🙂 anyone? Thankfully, we no longer have to resort to punctuation to create smiley faces, because the little emoticons do it for us.
Everyone’s most used emoji is as unique as they are. While some tend to really enjoy ? others like to keep things low-key with ✨. But there’s one that has trumped every single one of them, and considering it’s my most used emoji, I’m not entirely surprised.
Coming in at first place, “face with tears of joy” is the most popular emoji of 2021, followed by “red heart”. The third is “rolling on the floor laughing”, the fourth is “thumbs up” and the fifth is “loud crying face”. The results, which have been released by Unicode Consortium, the organisation that maintains the standards for text messaging, are quite similar to previous years.
In terms of categories, the “rocket ship” was the most used among the “Transport” options, the flexed-bicep in “Body Parts” and the butterfly for “Animals”. Meanwhile, the least used category is “Flags’ despite having the largest collection of 258 emojis.
If you’re wondering what the point of this data is besides being interesting, Unicode Consortium will use the results to decide which characters they should add next.
So it’s safe to say, that despite Gen Z deeming the “face with tears of joy” as uncool (along with side parts and skinny jeans), it’s still taking home the top prize.
“It speaks to how many people use emoji. If emoji were a purely Gen Z thing, then you wouldn’t see it so highly ranked,” emoji researcher at Google Alexander Robertson told The Times. “Because of the sheer number of people using emoji, even if one group thinks something is lame, they have to be a really big group to affect these statistics.”
