Adam Kos With the end of the year approaching, the Unicode Consortium came up with a fun study that shows the emoticons that were used the most in 2021. From the results, it can be seen that it was mostly about laughter and love, so important feelings. But compared to previous years, there are actually not that many changes. It can be seen that people simply use more or less the same ones.
Emoji was created by Japanese Shigetaka Kurita, who in 1999 designed 176 12 × 12 pixel graphic symbols for use in the i-mode mobile service, a Japanese alternative to WAP. Since then, however, they have become popular in all electronic news and, for that matter, in the entire digital world. The Unicode Consortium then takes care of the technical standard of the computing field defining a uniform character set and consistent character encoding for the representation and processing of texts applicable to most of the fonts currently used on Earth. And it regularly comes with new sets of "smileys".
A character representing tears of joy has become the most used emoji of 2021 around the world - and apart from the red heart emoji, no one else comes close in popularity. According to data collected by the consortium, tears of joy accounted for 5% of all emoticon usage. Other emoticons in the TOP 10 included "rolling on the ground laughing", "thumbs up" or "loud crying face". The Unicode Consortium also mentioned a few other tidbits in their report, including the fact that the top 100 emoticons account for nearly 82% of all emoji usage. And that's despite the fact that it's actually available on 3 individual emoticons.
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Pavel Jelic Comparison with previous years
If you were interested in the order of the individual categories, the rocket ship 🚀 is clearly at the top in transport, the biceps 💪 again in body parts, and the butterfly 🦋 is the most used animal emoticon. Conversely, the least popular category is generally the flags that are sent the least. Paradoxically, this is the largest set.
- 2019: 😂 ❤️ 😍 🤣 😊 🙏 💕 😭 😘 👍
- 2021: 😂 ❤️ 🤣 👍 😭 🙏 😘 🥰 😍 😊
In terms of changes over time, tears of joy and red hearts have been the leaders since 2019. Clasped hands remained in sixth place during that time frame, although other emoticons changed slightly. But in general, it is still different variants of laughter, love and crying. On pages unicode.org however, you can look at the individual popularity of different emojis also in terms of how the popularity of a given expression of emotion or symbol representing whatever has increased or decreased.
