We will admit that the “tears of joy” emoji is our most used emoji across all platforms, but we’re not alone and that gives us a sense of comfort.
The Unicode Consortium, which digitises the world’s languages, but is more widely known for its implementation of emoji, has announced the most popular emoji used throughout 2021.
The Tears of Joy emoji accounts for five percent of all emoji use around the world. A plain red heart comes in second but after that, the Unicode Consortium says there is something of a cliff face between the top two and the remainder of the top 10.
The top 10 emoji are:
- ????
- ❤️
- ????
- ????
- ????
- ????
- ????
- ????
- ????
- ????
What is incredibly interesting, however, is how many emoji we simply don’t use. For example, there are 258 country-flag emoji, but these are used the least.
The Unicode Consortium takes a deep dive into how the world uses emoji and there are some interesting findings. For instance, emoji that can be used in multiple instances prove more popular. The crown emoji for instance is used constantly while emoji for clutch bag, lab coat and flat shoe are rarely used if ever.
“This data is a strong signal to encode fewer specific concepts like flags and less single-use objects like shower caps. And, instead focus on globally-relevant, well established communicative concepts. The committee encourages proposers to read our guidelines on what makes a strong emoji candidates and pay close attention to each of the criteria for inclusion such as: multiple uses, use in sequences, and breaking new ground,” writes the Consortium.
You can find those guidelines here.
“And of course COVID continues to be part of our everyday lives as we enter 2022. Despite health-related emoji being used more often, only ???? and ???? managed to enter the Top 100 in 2021. ???? moved up from 186 to 156 while ???? only just made it into the Top 500. This reflects the sheer number of emoji we use and the variety of situations we use them in, as well as the many different functions they have in our online lives: a global pandemic that changed the way we live had little effect on how we express ourselves online ???? ❤️ ???? ???? ???? ????,” Unicode concludes.
We highly recommend visiting the Unicode Consortium’s blog here for more data about how the world used emoji in 2021.
