A report by the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit organisation that promotes the development and maintenance of worldwide Bidirectional Algorithm for Language (BEL) coding systems, has revealed the most popular emojis expected to be used in 2021 and beyond.
According to the survey, the emoji “face with tears of joy” came in a top position, accounting for more than 5 per cent of all emojis used worldwide. Hearts are ranked second on a scale from one to ten, with rolling on the floor laughing coming in third, thumbs upcoming in fourth, and a loud sobbing face coming in fifth.
The survey also looked at emojis by category and found that flags, although being the group that had the most number of emojis, were the least utilised. The statistics also revealed that the rocket ship emoji was the most popular in the Transport-air group and that the flexed bicep emoji was the most popular in the Body-parts subset.
Among the most commonly used emojis were those in the Face-smiling and Hands categories, according to the findings. Plants and flowers emoji, on the other hand, was quite popular and dominated the ‘Animals and Nature’ category, despite the fact that they were a smaller sub-category. The ‘bouquet’ emoji is the most frequently used in the plant floral category, whereas the ‘butterfly’ emoji is the most frequently used in the animal emoji category.
According to Unicode, the top 200 list has more significant leaps. The most significant climbers were the ‘birthday cake’ emoji, which rose to the 25th rank from its previous position of 113. The ‘balloon’ emoji has moved up to the 48th position from its previous position of 139th, and the ‘pleading face’ emoji has moved up to the 14th position from its previous position of 97th.
Interestingly, the coronavirus epidemic has had minimal impact on the popularity of emoji germs, which barely cracked the top 500 on Google’s list of popular emojis. Among the top 100 most frequently used emojis in 2021, only the hot and dizzy looks were connected to health. Please keep in mind that there are now only 3,663 emoticons available. In terms of use, the top 100 emojis account for 82 per cent of the entire number of emojis.
This type of data, while just fascinating, is really highly beneficial to the Unicode Consortium, which makes it a valuable resource. It assists them in understanding and gauging which emojis are the most popular, as well as for deciding which characters to add next to their repertoire.