It's World Emoji Day and these are the 10 most popular emojis right now

Emojis are practically a separate language when talking to people online. It doesn't matter whether you speak English, French, or Mandarin; you can easily understand what your friend is trying to say when they drop an emoji into the conversation.

They are like visual shortcuts that help us express emotions or ideas quickly, without fear of the language barrier. Not to mention, it's hard to show that you're laughing at a funny meme someone sent in a typed conversation or expressing sarcasm at a dumb act performed by your sibling.

Emojis are popular! Not just Android and iOS, emojis are supported on other platforms, including Windows, Linux, and ChromeOS. They are a common sight virtually everywhere, including social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, X, and Snapchat.

That's why July 17 is celebrated as World Emoji Day. It was created by Australian emoji historian and Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge in 2014. July 14 was picked as the date for World Emoji Day because it's the same date that appears on the Calendar emoji on Apple devices. This is the date when Apple launched the iCal application (now Calendar) for Mac in 2002.

Emoji development has been streamlined through the universal character encoding scheme known as Unicode. Its governing body, the Unicode Consortium, has an emoji subcommittee specifically tasked with reviewing proposals for new emojis.

That said, you might be wondering what the most popular emojis are used by the online population. Here are the top ten emojis globally arranged in descending order:

The information comes from the Emojipedia's EmojiTracker website, which recently got a second life after years. Its original version, created by Matthew Rothenberg in 2013, used data from Twitter (now X) to rank popular emojis. The new version tracks emojis copied from Emojipedia and GetEmoji in real time.

Note that Emojipedia is a member of the Unicode Consortium. Since the tracker is updated in real-time, the emojis listed as top 10 might change after this story is published. The website has also published a list of the most popular new emojis, which include "Face with Bags Under Eyes," " Splatter," and "Shovel" in the top three spots. All of these emojis were approved in 2024 and added to Unicode 16.0.

Emojis have inspired several modern features. The Animoji feature on iPhones and iPads utilizes the TrueDepth camera to capture facial expressions and replicate them in real-time on animated characters. Apple's Memoji feature, introduced in iOS 12, lets you create a digital avatar that mimics your facial expressions and voice.

More recently, Apple introduced Genmoji, which uses generative AI to create custom emojis based on text prompts. Similarly, Android has features like Emoji Kitchen to create mashups by combining multiple emojis, Samsung's AR Emoji, and Photomoji in Google Messages, which can transform photos into custom stickers.

Microsoft also pulled a weird emoji trick in Teams in a new update. Windows has also had a dramatic relationship with emojis, to the point that they feel like an overlooked feature. The Redmond giant teased a massive 3D redesign of over 1,800 emojis ahead of the Windows 11 launch in 2021.

However, it turned out to be a marketing blunder for Windows 11 users as the company stuffed 2D Fluent emojis in the new update instead of the 3D ones it promised. Windows 11 eventually got support for 3D emojis, but users still deal with the frustration of not having country flag emojis.

While they are available on virtually every major operating system and web browser, the lack of flag emojis pre-dates Windows 11. Microsoft chooses to show the two-letter ISO country code (such as "US" or "UK") instead of the actual colorful flag. Searching for the flag in the emoji picker yields no graphical results.