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Tears of Joy Remained Most Used Emoji in 2021

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Tears of Joy continued to be one of the most popular emoji used worldwide in 2021, according to the Unicode Consortium's list of the top emoji used throughout the year.

2021-most-popular-emoji.jpg

The ? emoji accounts for over five percent of all emoji use, and the only other emoji that comes close is the heart emoji (❤️).

Other top emoji in 2021 included rolling on the floor laughing face, thumbs up, loudly crying face, hands pressed together, face blowing kiss, face with hearts, face with heart eyes, and smiling face, or in emoji: ? ❤️ ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?.

The most popular emoji haven't changed much over the past couple of years, and in fact, crying laughing face and red heart were also the top two emoji in 2019, which was the last time that the Unicode Consortium shared emoji data. Other emoji on the list have shifted position and there are a few that are new to the top 10 list, such as thumbs up and face with hearts.

The Unicode Consortium also broke emoji down by category to discover the top used smileys, people emoji, symbols, clothing, animals, travel emoji, objects, and food emoji, with graphs of the frequency of use available on the Unicode Consortium website.

emoji-smileys-2021.jpg

Party popper is the most popular event emoji, for example, followed by balloon and gift. Fire is the most popular weather emoji, unsurprisingly, and the most popular plant emoji is the rose. The butterfly is the most used bug emoji, and rabbit face is the most used mammal emoji.

Of the clothing emoji, the crown is the most popular, and the birthday cake is by far the most popular sweet food emoji. Hot beverage is the most popular drink emoji, and in the fruit category, strawberry takes the top spot.

More on the most popular emoji in 2021 can be found through the Unicode Consortium's full 2021 emoji breakdown.

Article Link: Tears of Joy Remained Most Used Emoji in 2021
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/02/most-popular-emoji-2021/
As an “elder Millennial” near the Gen X cut off, I’ve been told the ? is only used by old, uncool people.

But since I’m uncool, I have no idea what to use in its place!
 
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Reactions: gymratjudy
I wish I could disable them on iOS. I have them disabled on MacOS and in apps like Slack. I just think they're dumb but I'm an old man and kids will be kids.
 
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contacos said:
How do they even know this? I thought my messages are secure ?
Click to expand...
Unicode is the organization that put this together, not Apple. Unicode I'm sure has no access to your messages. You can read the full article on Unicode's website.

temende said:
...so now our emoji use is being tracked too?
Click to expand...
...well what isn't being tracked? Their sole job is to make emojis, so it's safe to assume they are trying to figure out what emoji is used the most and get analytics based on their products.
 
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contacos said:
How do they even know this? I thought my messages are secure ?
Click to expand...
Messages probably don't have to be "read" to extract that info. They could simply count the number of occurrences of all / specific characters, wouldn't really reveal much, similar to the number of times a button is pressed (which are almost always extensively tracked for a lot of reasons).

Edit: just to be clear, I'm not suggesting Apple do this. It's just "how I would do it" in a secure way that still gave me a good usage picture.
 
incoherent_1 said:
As an “elder Millennial” near the Gen X cut off, I’ve been told the ? is only used by old, uncool people.

But since I’m uncool, I have no idea what to use in its place!
Click to expand...
My sources tell me it’s now ? or ⚰️…as in “that’s so funny I’m dead”. But if I used those emojis with most of my peers, they’d assume someone had literally died or that I wished the recipient was dead. So I shall embrace my uncoolness!?
 
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incoherent_1 said:
As an “elder Millennial” near the Gen X cut off, I’ve been told the ? is only used by old, uncool people.

But since I’m uncool, I have no idea what to use in its place!
Click to expand...

As a "youngin Gen Xer" near the Millennial cut off, I consider all emojis to be cancer. If forced to convey any emotion in a message just use old-school : ( or ; ) from the days of AOL chat rooms. Yeap, I'm a snob.
 
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When will we get the combination of these two? ?? Will save the earth some 10 billion man hours in just saving the extra click given current world events
 
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kinless said:
As a "youngin Gen Xer" near the Millennial cut off, I consider all emojis to be cancer. If forced to convey any emotion in a message just use old-school : ( or ; ) from the days of AOL chat rooms. Yeap, I'm a snob.
Click to expand...
If you were truly a snob, you wouldn’t have been on AOL, but IRC, Gopher, Telnet and Usenet… as God intended.
 
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Based on what I see in MR, the laughing emojis should be categorized in "face negative". They're used for mocking more than good humor.
 
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