World Emoji Day: Which are the most popular?

A selection of the tiny pictures is being celebrated and a new collection will be released

The top 10 most popular emojis, according to Emojipedia. Photo: Apple

Emojis have changed the way people talk over text message and on Monday, the tiny pictures with the potential to express a thousand emotions are being celebrated as part of the annual World Emoji Day, which marks its 10th anniversary this year.

Most popular emojis

Emojipedia, which documents and analyses the emojis approved by the Unicode Consortium, the international body that regulates emojis and other digital characters, has released its list of the current most popular emojis based on people visiting their meaning pages on the website. These include:

• Heart Hands
• Red Heart
• Fire
• Skull
• Check Mark Button
• Waning Crescent Moon
• Face With Tears of Joy
• Face Holding Back Tears
• Smiling Face With Smiling Eyes
• Melting Face

The blog also analysed the use of emojis on Twitter. In July 2013, during the early years of emojis, only four out of every 100 tweets contained at least one emoji. Fast forward to March 2023, and about 27 tweets in every 100 had at least one emoji.

New emojis for 2023-2024

As with every year, Unicode will approve a new set of emojis that will be released in a staggered fashion from September. Emojipedia created sample illustrations of some of the items on the Emoji 50.1 draft list, which includes a lime, a head shaking vertically and a phoenix.

There are 108 new emojis being considered this year, most of which are skin colour and directional variations. For example, the emoji for a person in a wheelchair facing right will also have a version facing left.

All the proposed emojis in the draft are expected to be approved, and they will then be adopted by technology companies such as Apple to include in their own software updates.

Emojis: A brief history

The first set of pixelated icons was designed in 1999 by Shigeta Kurita, who is considered the founding father of emojis, for mobile phones and pagers. The term emoji is a blend of two Japanese words: those for picture and letter or character.

Kurita designed 176 emojis, drawing on sources such as Japanese graphic novels, the typeface Zapf Dingbats and common symbols. The original set is displayed at the Museum of Modern Arts in New York, and includes illustrations of weather situations, as well as the heart symbol and a range of facial expressions.

The start of emojis being used worldwide is associated with Apple's addition of an emoji keyboard in 2011, which was immediately followed by Android. Now, there are 3,664 emojis on record, according to Unicode.