Do you know what it means?
Surely you already know that the word “Emoji” was chosen as the word of the year 2019. But, what else do you know about them?
Emojis first appeared in the 1990s to make messages easier to understand. They did their job so well that today we cannot imagine a digital conversation without including an emoticon to clarify or complement a text or even directly replace a word or expression. Experts even point out that emojis represent the first language created by the digital world.
Before revealing the secret of the most used emoticons or emojis, let’s expand our knowledge a little about these precious little drawings.
The predecessor of the emoji is the emoticon. These were used in the 1990s in chats and forums. The most common were :-) and :-( to express happiness or sadness and the winking face ;-).
Regarding the word “Emoji,” it comes from Japanese: the letter 'e' means 'picture' and 'moji' means 'letter.' The Japanese designer Shigetaka Kurita was responsible for creating the first emojis in 1999 for a Japanese telephone company. Later, Apple, Facebook, and Google began to seek the opportunity to incorporate them into their platforms, and in 2011 Apple added an official emoji keyboard to iOS. Android followed suit two years later.
In 2014, one of the most important updates was launched with five new skin tones and a set of same-sex couples. Since then, each update has included more and more diversity of people and cultures, and there are now more than 3000 emojis included in our keyboards.
The face crying with laughter, one of the most used
To know the most used emoji, we have to go back to 2017, when the University of Michigan conducted a study on the most used emoticons on WhatsApp in each country. Among the 427 million messages collected, there was a clear winner among countries like the United States, France, Spain, Argentina, or Russia. It is none other than the face crying with laughter 😂. One of the most used both in the app and in messages on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
Even today, with sites like EmojiTracker (which, as its name indicates, continuously records the use of emoticons, but only on Twitter) still places the smiling face as the most used by users.
The same happens with Unicode (the common and standardized character format created to allow the display and transmission of digital writings), which in October 2019 listed the following emojis as the most used:
- 😂
- ❤️
- 😍
- 🤣
- 😊
- 🙏
- 💕
- 😭
- 😘
- 👍
The least used emojis
According to Emoji Tracker, the loser emoji on Twitter is the "input symbol for capital Latin letters"
This is the list of the ten least used emojis on Twitter:
- Input symbol for capital Latin letters (top left)
- Cable car
- Non-potable water symbol
- Input symbol for symbols
- Input symbol for lowercase Latin letters
- Input symbol for Latin letters
- Passport control
- Mountain cable car
- No littering symbol
- Mountain railway (bottom right)
Despite these lists of the most and least used emojis, we cannot assign a single meaning to each of these symbols. Their Japanese origins do not imply that people give them the same meaning since someone who does not belong to the same culture will not know the real sense with which they were initially designed.
Since these are symbols open to interpretation by each person as they wish, they are truly so useful and widely used worldwide. What makes them so effective when communicating is precisely the endless combinations and interpretations they allow. In an attempt to give some coherence and uniformity in the use of emojis, there are sites like Emojipedia that describe the meaning of the different symbols.
July 17, World Emoji Day, do you know why?
For some years now, every July 17 is celebrated as World Emoji Day, which commemorates the use of emoticons on all social networks. But why was this date chosen to celebrate World Emoji Day? It is no coincidence, since July 17 is the day shown on the iPhone calendar emoji.
However, on social networks, the day shown on the calendar emoji changes. On Facebook, it appears as February 4, the day its website was launched in 2004, and May 14, Mark Zuckerberg’s birthday. Meanwhile, on Twitter, it appears as March 21, coinciding with the first tweet from its founder Jack Dorsey where he wrote “setting up my twttr.”
It is worth adding that in 2018 it was suggested for the first time that all users communicate only with emojis on this day, a challenge whose achievement is getting closer if we consider the number of emoticons available. And you, would you be able to do it?
