The red heart, loudly crying face, and fire emoji rank as the world’s most used, according to Emojipedia. Its founder, Jeremy Burge, established World Emoji Day on July 17th, now an annual celebration of this ubiquitous digital communication. The date, visible on calendar emojis, was chosen for this purpose. The BBC reports approximately 10 billion emojis are sent globally each day.
This September, Unicode Consortium, the non-profit body standardizing digital characters, is expected to approve a new batch of emojis. If all proposed additions pass, the total available emoji count will reach 3,954, nearing the 4,000 mark.
The primitive concept of emoticons originated in September 1982 with Scott Fahlman, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, seeking coded communication with colleagues. However, the modern pictorial emoji emerged in Japan during the late 1990s. The first emoji was created by Shigetaka Kurita while working for a telecom company. Apple later mainstreamed them by integrating emojis into the iPhone upon its 2008 release.
Emojipedia notes that Generation Z, digital natives, is radically reinterpreting traditional emoji meanings. The slightly smiling face is now often used sarcastically, the thumbs-up can signal passive aggression, and the wilted flower has replaced the broken heart for expressing sadness. The site predicts the following emojis will surge in popularity by 2025: the face with bags under eyes, a purple splatter, a shovel, a fingerprint, and a harp.