Thechorus image is on thecdn.vox-cdn.com.
Each face with tears of joy is terrifying.
I used to be a big fan of the traditional smiley emoji. It is cute! I used to think that it indicated my gentle amusement at everything from puns to fun weekend plans. The Guardian says that this was a mistake, and that I was actually sending an insult to everyone by doing that.
It seems the rest of the world agrees that the "slightly smiling face" doesn't feature in the top 10 of the most used emoji. The slightly smiling face is not in the top 20 according to data from the Unicode Consortium. It is at number 28 and sandwiched between cupped hands and flushed face.
Noupscale is a file onchorusasset.com.
The ranking of the top 10 characters has changed.
The image is from the Unicode Consortium.
The world has continued its love affair with face with tears of joy, a blunt instrument of the emoji, instead of embracing the subtle joys of the slightly smiling face. It has been at the top since at least 2017, and accounted for over 5% of online emoji. It's ridiculous.
It is interesting to see how consistent the emoji are, even as the world has been turned upside down by the Pandemic. The top 10 emoji have only changed one time in the last two years, and that was to swap two very similar ones.
There were some big changes. The balloon floated from 139 to 48, while the birthday cake emoji shot up from 25 to 25. The pleading face rose from 97 to 14. The microbe emoji, which barely made it into the top 500, hasn't seen much of a change.
It is useful for the Unicode Consortium to understand which characters are most popular as it decides which characters to add next. Jay Peters wrote an article about the process of creating the yawning face and waffle emoji, and you can read about it in this article.
There is hope that we will be slightly smiling face fans. Between the years of 2020 and 2021, the popularity of the emoji went up a lot. We might make it into the top 10 at this rate.
