World Emoji Day 2025: What's the most popular emoji?
What is the most used emoji?
Each emoji has to be approved by Unicode Consortium - a group who decide which new emoji characters should be introduced.With 3,521 to chose from it can sometimes be hard to know which one to use, but here are the top three used most often, according to emoji experts, Emojipedia.
Red heart
At number one, it's the classic red heart. It shows you love someone or something, what a nice one to send! According to Emojipedia it's the most popular of all time - the "most beloved of all emojis, old or new."
Loudly crying face
The second most common emoji at the moment according to Emojipedia is the loud crying face. The most obvious thing it's used for is for when you're upset, but it's often used as a way of showing crying with laughter, too. What's the last thing you found so funny you cried this hard?
Fire
At number three is the fire emoji. If something is described as flames it means it's good, so you might be sending this if you like your friend's outfit or you're talking about a new hit single you like.
Where does the word emoji come from?
You may think that emoji has something to do with conveying emotion, however the similarity in the two words is entirely coincidental.The word is actually Japanese, combining the kanji for picture and character.The first work is picture, which is 絵, and is pronounced eh. Letter, or character in Japanese is 文字, and is pronounced mōji.
What existed before emojis?
A word that did actually come from emotion is emoticon.These were used before emojis existed.Essentially, people would type different punctuation symbols, numbers and letters to resemble different emotions.For example, when typed a colon and a close bracket looks like a smiley face, so it would be used to convey happiness :)
How are new emojis created and approved?
A non-profit organisation called Unicode Consortium are in charge of the creation of new emojis.Anyone can submit a proposal, and then Unicode look at them all and decide which to make.Their decisions are based on how many people across the world would recognise them and use them, among other things.Once approved, they're added to the Unicode Standard, and then companies like Apple and Google can choose to add them to their devices.
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