ALBAWABA - A yellow face filled with tears of joy. Yes, it is the most widely used symbol in the world.
On July 17th of every year, "World Emoji Day" arrives to celebrate those symbols that have become a part of our lives, expressing our emotions in a small image that brings people together, regardless of their differences.
With a beating or broken heart, a face crying in sadness or happiness, or even hands held together in gratitude, emojis have become a common language in everyone's lives. They have become a lifeline for those busy individuals who can respond with a simple image rather than a complete sentence.
If you are one of the nearly 2.78 billion users of the "WhatsApp" application, open the app now, and you will find that most, if not all, of your conversations, include emojis representing your mood. Despite the widespread use of emojis since 2014, the beginning dates back to 1995 when the non-profit American organization, the Unicode Consortium, standardized the first 76 pictorial images. In 1999, the collection of the Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita, consisting of 176 simple pictographs for a Japanese phone operator, marked the birth of emojis as we know them today.
By 2010, the American organization released a massive set of over a thousand emoji characters to align with the thriving trend in Japan. The choice of this day to celebrate emojis goes back to Jeremy Burge, the founder of "Emojipedia," who launched an encyclopedia dedicated to everything related to emojis, allowing researchers to discover the origin of each symbol. It also coincides with the same day in 2002 when Apple introduced the calendar application "iCal" in the form of an emoji representing an Easter egg.
During the World Emoji Day, social media platforms are filled with users sharing their favorite emojis. According to the official website of this day, over 100 tweets are posted per minute, reaching up to 175 tweets per minute by Twitter users celebrating this day. This event gathers over four billion impressions on the platform annually. In 2016, on the World Emoji Day, an official announcement was made for an American movie inspired by emojis called "The Emoji Movie." Despite the global popularity and usage of emojis, the movie did not achieve the same success. On the same day in 2017, the Empire State Building was illuminated in yellow, paying tribute to these famous symbols.
In 2020, the hashtag "World Emoji Day" trended on the Twitter application, and in 2019, over 190,000 accounts sent more than 300,000 tweets related to emojis.
The Uses of Emojis
Emojis are widely prevalent on social media platforms, with 900 million users exchanging them daily on Messenger and over 700 million emoji characters shared by Facebook users in their posts.
"The face with tears of joy" ranks first among the most globally used emojis from 2011 to 2021, temporarily replacing the "crying face" for a brief period, only to regain the top spot starting from January 2022. It appears in nearly two billion tweets on Twitter.
Emojis are used by approximately 92% of internet users worldwide, and their usage is not limited to conversations between friends. Over 77% of employees incorporated emojis into their work messages in the last three months of 2020, according to a study conducted by the business research company "Clutch."
Emojis have evolved over the years, with around 217 new emoji characters introduced in 2021, approximately 117 in 2020, and over 200 in 2019. The number of different emojis currently stands at around 3,664 symbols.
