Emojis are almost a language unto themselves in online communication. Whether you speak English, French, or Mandarin, you can easily understand what your friends are trying to say when they add emojis to their conversations. They are like visual shortcuts that help us express emotions or ideas quickly without worrying about language barriers. What's more, when typing and chatting, it is difficult for you to show that you are laughing at the funny emoticons sent by others, or that you are mocking the stupid behavior of your brothers and sisters.
Emojis are so popular that they are supported not only on Android and iOS, but also on other platforms, including Windows, Linux, and ChromeOS. They can be found almost everywhere, including on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, X, and Snapchat.
That's why July 17th is designated as World Emoji Day. The day was founded in 2014 by Jeremy Berg, an Australian emoji historian and founder of Emojipedia. July 14 was chosen as World Emoji Day because it is the same date as the calendar emojis on Apple devices. Apple launched the iCal app (now Calendar) for Mac in 2002.
The development of emoji is simplified through Unicode, a universal character encoding scheme. Its governing body, the Unicode Consortium, has an Emoji Subcommittee that reviews proposals for new emojis.
Having said that, you might be wondering what are the most commonly used emojis by users online. Here are the top ten emojis in the world, in descending order:
The information comes from Emojipedia's EmojiTracker website, which was created by Matthew Rothenberg in 2013 after a multi-year effort to rank popular emojis using data from Twitter (now Twitter X). The new version tracks emojis copied from Emojipedia and GetEmoji in real time.
Emojipedia is a member of the Unicode Consortium. Since the tracker is updated in real time, the top ten emojis may change after this article is published. The site also released a list of the most popular new emojis, with baggy face, ink splash and shovel rounding out the top three. All these emojis were approved in 2024 and added to Unicode 16.0.