It has been announced that the laughing emoji is the most used emoji in the world. The statement was made within the data of the Unicode Consortium, the body responsible for encoding universal characters for the web, including emojis used on smartphones and computers.
Unicode says that 92% of the worldwide online population uses emoji, and the laughing-to-tear emoji, technically known as “Tears of Joy”, accounts for 5% of that usage.
The 10 most used emojis worldwide
It turns out that the use of emoji has not changed much since 2019, when the Unicode Consortium last published this data. At that time, Tears of Joy and heart emojis were the 2 most used emojis in the world.
Still, there are other symbols that are fast gaining popularity this year: the birthday cake emoji jumped 88 places to number 25; Balloon emoji increased from 139 to 48. The question mark emoji in the box, which was added only in 2018, is currently the 14th most popular emoji according to the Unicode Consortium.
The consortium, made up of members such as Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, votes on new emojis every year and adds them to iPhones and Android devices. In the last count, it was announced that there are 3,663 different emojis in total.