More Than a 🙂

By the Numbers

World Emoji Day is July 17, and it’s a 👌 time to 🔍 at these tiny pictures that say a lot—and fast. While some people find emoji to be a 🔥 universal shorthand, others prefer to have their thoughts all spelled out. Whether you 👍 or 👎 them, emoji have evolved into a shared digital language understood across borders, cultures, and even literacy levels. And that’s something we can all ❤️.

Artist Shigetaka Kurita created the first comprehensive set of emoji—Japanese for “picture characters”—to convey information such as weather or emotions at a glance. Now preserved in New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, Kurita’s original 176 icons were the first to achieve widespread use in mobile messaging and helped spark emoji’s rapid rise in popularity. By 2015, 😂 had even been named “Word of the Year” by Oxford Dictionaries.

Sources: wired.com/story/emoji-word-year-2015-face-tears-joy; moma.org/collection/works/196070

Got a concept for the next emoji? Anyone can submit a proposal to the Unicode Consortium, the nonprofit that makes sure each character—from letters to emoji—has a unique digital code that works across devices. All submissions, which require a prototype and an explanation of how the emoji would be used, are reviewed by the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee. This process ensures that emoji look consistent and convey roughly the same idea wherever they appear.

Source: unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html

From texts to emails to social posts, more than 10 billion emoji are used each day, and over 80 percent come from just 100 icons. Emoji have even entered the workplace: 70 percent of US online users report sending them on the job. While questions about professionalism persist, studies suggest that adding an emoji can make you come across as more attentive and emotionally tuned in—tiny cues that stand in for body language.

Sources: home.unicode.org/emoji/emoji-frequency; journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0326189; blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2022/09/30/heres-why-emoji-are-becoming-huge-in-workplace-beyond

The loudly crying face emoji, first introduced in Unicode 6.0 in 2010, was the most-used social media icon in 2025. Meanwhile, the red heart emoji remains a worldwide favorite year after year across all platforms. Not every emoji becomes a ⭐️, however. Case in point: 🔣, the “symbol for symbols,” has lingered at the bottom of the emoji leaderboard.

Sources: meltwater.com/en/blog/top-emojis-2025-usage-trends; pulsarplatform.com/blog/2019/war-is-over-here-is-the-least-used-emoji

What started as a niche communication tool has grown into a digital catalog of thousands of symbols spanning emotions, occupations, foods, flags, and more. Every September, a new emoji update is released and then gradually implemented across devices. In 2025, Unicode 17.0 introduced 163 new emoji, which included more skin-tone variations.

Source: emojipedia.org/emoji-17.0