Emojis come and go out of fashion all the time, but according to the Unicode Consortium some emoji usage has remained just as strong as ever.
In its latest report on emoji usage, the Unicode Consortium utilized data from the past year to determine the most popular emojis right now. While there is one newcomer to the list, nine of the top ten emojis remain unchanged from 2019’s top ten list. According to the Consortium, which tracks digital text and unicode character usage, 92 percent of the world’s population uses emojis.
Unsurprisingly, the crying-laughing emoji remains the most used emoji in the world, although it could be attributed to how it’s often used more than once in a single message to punctuate how hilarious someone finds something. In fact, the emoji counts for 5 percent of all emoji usage in 2021. The only other one to get that close is the regular heart emoji, followed by the rolling on floor laughing emoji, a thumbs up, streams of tears, prayer hands, the kiss emoji, smiling face with three hearts, heart eyes, and blushing.
Experts have suggested that Gen Z isn’t a big fan of the crying-laughing emoji, but its placement at No.1 is still unsurprising. "It speaks to how many people use emoji. If emoji were a purely Gen Z thing, then you wouldn’t see it so highly ranked," Google's emoji researcher Alexander Robertson told the New York Times. "Because of the sheer number of people using emoji, even if one group thinks something is lame, they have to be a really big group to affect these statistics."
Check out the full statistics on emoji usage in 2021 here.
