I know you have heard of emojis. Why? Because 92% of the world uses them. That is according to the Unicode Consortium. Have you heard of the Unicode Consortium; me neither? They are the organization that, among other things, standardizes all of those fonts, symbols, and yes, all of those emojis that appear on the texts and emails we receive.
Though intentionally silly in appearance, emojis are serious enough to require an organization to determine and standardize the ones available for us to use. Emojis, when you think about it, are a world language. They lack the barriers to understanding created by languages.
What I found interesting (and I thought you would as well) is Unicode’s listing of emoji frequency. According to Unicode, there are 3,663 emojis. That is a lot, but it is the top 100 that account for 82% of usage. If you want to review the complete list, you can do so by clicking here.
Here are the highlights that I picked out:
Tears of joy #1 (Happiness is a dominating emotion, and that makes me happy)
Red Heart #2 (Love rules)
Thumbs Up #4 (For some reason, receiving the thumbs up emoji irritates me)
Loudly Crying Face #5 (Well, not everyone is in love or happy)
Face Blowing a Kiss #7 (
Here are some emojis that surprised me that they weren’t more popular:
Cat With Tears of Joy #146 (and that was the highest rated cat emoji)
And if you think that is surprising, Dog Face is #169
Woman Dancing is #117
While Man Dancing is #238 (Men obviously don’t dance but check out eggplant)
Egglant is #165 (higher than Man Dancing and Dog Face)
Double Exclamation Point #113
Double Question Mark #239 (meaning people are more emphatic than questioning)
Check out the entire list. Its a lot of fun and very interesting.
