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It’s the end of the year, so many top lists are hitting the news sites: most popular music artists, top-watched Netflix series, and so on. However, let’s take a look at something a little closer to home. While we all love using emojis, which one ranks top? The answer might surprise you – even though this particular emoji has ranked number one for the third year straight!
Laugh-Cry Emoji Is 2021’s Winner
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While Gen Z might have ranked the laugh-cry emoji, seen above, as one of the most “uncool” emojis out there, that has not stopped it from becoming the most most-used emoji in the world. That’s right! According to new data from the Unicode Consortium, the organization responsible for encoding all those adorable characters for the internet, more than 92% of internet and data users worldwide use emoji every day. Meanwhile, the famous laugh-cry emoji — officially known as “Tears of Joy” — makes up nearly 5% of all emoji usage.
What other emoji round out the top ten? Well, after laugh-cry, its heart at number two and rolling laugh-cry at number three. Thumbs up, crying, praying hands, kissing, in love (hearts floating around a smiling face), heart eyes, and smiling face with rosy cheeks took the other seven spots.
Interestingly, it turns out that the top ten emojis have not changed much in the last few years…
Unicode Consortium’s Important Data
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The Unicode Consortium last published the most used emojis data back in 2019. Even then, laugh-cry and heart still held two of the top three spots. In fact, “Tears of Joy” has ranked number one since 2017. That’s right! Still, that does not mean that other symbols are not making their way up the chart! For instance, the birthday cake emoji jumped up a whopping 88 spots to number 25. Meanwhile, the single balloon emoji rose from 139 to number 48. Talk about a jump!
For those who don’t know, the Unicode Consortium – which is made up of members from the likes of Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Facebook, among others – votes annually on which new emojis should be added to the net. Last year, the Consortium added over 100 new emojis to the web. Now, there are over 3,600 emoji characters in total.
The reason for all the new characters? Well, Jay Peters, who helped create the yawning face emoji, said it’s easier than ever. “You’ll still have to wait a long time before you can actually use that emoji on your device, assuming your proposal wins out, but the process is well worth the chance to make your own little addition to internet culture,” Peters said.
