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Rounding up the emojis…
Rounding up the emojis…
The definitive collection of emoji usage data, demographics, platform statistics, and fascinating facts. Over 10 billion emoji are sent every day — here is what the numbers reveal about how we communicate.
By ACiDek · Updated February 2025 · Data from Unicode Consortium, Adobe, Meta, and academic research
Each Unicode release adds a batch of new emoji. The biggest jump came with Unicode 10.0 in 2017, which added 875 emoji including skin tone combinations. Recent versions add fewer characters as the most common concepts are already covered.
Smileys & People dominate the emoji set by a wide margin, mostly because skin tone and gender variants multiply the base emoji count. Symbols and Objects come next, while Activities has the fewest.
There are 135 food & drink emoji but only 14 of them are vegetables
There are more heart emoji (25+) than there are planet emoji (9)
Cat faces (9) outnumber dog faces (4) by more than 2 to 1
There are 6 clock emoji showing every 30 minutes but no emoji for a wristwatch face
Japan has 3 special emoji (🗾🎌💹) while most countries only get a flag
There are 5 different mail/envelope emoji but only 1 toilet
Different platforms see wildly different emoji usage patterns. WhatsApp leads in total volume, but TikTok is growing fastest at +32% year-over-year. Workplace platforms like Slack and Teams are seeing rapid emoji adoption as remote work normalizes casual digital communication.
| Platform | Daily Emoji | Top Emoji | Growth |
|---|---|---|---|
| ~5B/day | 😂 ❤️ 🙏 | +12% YoY | |
| ~2.8B/day | ❤️ 🔥 ✨ | +18% YoY | |
| Twitter/X | ~1.5B/day | 😂 💀 😭 | +8% YoY |
| ~3.2B/day | 😂 ❤️ 😢 | +5% YoY | |
| TikTok | ~1.8B/day | 💀 😭 ✨ | +32% YoY |
| Slack/Teams | ~500M/day | 👍 🎉 ✅ | +22% YoY |
| iMessage | ~2B/day | 😂 ❤️ 👍 | +10% YoY |
Age and gender significantly influence emoji preferences. Gen Z has developed an entirely different emoji vocabulary than older generations, and women use emoji twice as frequently as men. These generational divides sometimes cause miscommunication — a thumbs up 👍 can feel dismissive to Gen Z but perfectly friendly to Gen X.
Emoji preferences vary dramatically by culture. France sends 4x more heart emoji than the global average, India leads with the folded hands gesture (namaste), and South Korea popularized the heart hands emoji through K-pop culture. These cultural patterns reveal fascinating differences in how different societies express emotion digitally.
Skull emoji rising fast as Gen Z humor marker
Cute/kawaii emoji culture; sparkles heavily used
Most expressive emoji users per capita
Heart emoji used 4x more than global average
Folded hands (namaste) is #1 emoji
Heart hands gesture popularized by K-pop culture
More reserved usage; thumbs up still popular
Usage patterns similar to US and UK
From 176 simple pictographs in 1999 to over 3,600 characters covering every aspect of human expression. The growth of the emoji set reflects the expanding scope of digital communication and the push for greater diversity and representation.
Shigetaka Kurita creates 176 emoji for NTT DoCoMo
Unicode 6.0 standardizes emoji (722 characters)
Unicode 7.0 adds 250 new emoji
Unicode 8.0 adds skin tone modifiers, 5 new types
Unicode 9.0 adds 72 emoji (selfie, face palm, avocado)
Unicode 10.0 adds 56 emoji (T-Rex, zombie, brain)
Unicode 11.0 adds 157 emoji (redhead, superhero)
Unicode 12.0 adds 59 emoji (yawning face, flamingo)
Unicode 13.0 adds 62 emoji (ninja, boomerang, dodo)
Unicode 14.0 adds 37 emoji (melting face, troll)
Unicode 15.0 adds 31 emoji (shaking head, moose)
Unicode 15.1 adds 118 emoji (directional people)
Unicode 16.0 adds 25 new emoji
July 17th is World Emoji Day, chosen because that date appears on the 📅 calendar emoji on Apple devices. The date was picked by Jeremy Burge, founder of Emojipedia.
Sony released The Emoji Movie in 2017 with a $50M budget. Despite earning $218M worldwide, it won the Razzie for Worst Picture and holds a 6% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Email subject lines with emoji have 56% higher open rates. Push notifications with emoji see 85% higher engagement. Twitter posts with emoji get 25% more engagement.
Emoji have been used as evidence in over 200 court cases worldwide. Judges have had to interpret whether 🔫, 👊, and 💣 constitute threats. Emoji interpretation in legal contexts is a growing area of digital law.
Neuroscience research shows the brain processes emoji similarly to actual human faces, activating the fusiform face area. This is why emoji feel more personal than plain text — your brain treats them like real expressions.
In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries chose 😂 (Face with Tears of Joy) as Word of the Year — the first time a pictograph received this honor, reflecting how deeply emoji had entered mainstream communication.
The workplace has embraced emoji more than many predicted. Remote work accelerated this trend, with teams using emoji to compensate for the lack of body language in digital communication.
of employees use emoji in work messages (up from 54% in 2019)
of managers think emoji in work chat is appropriate
engagement increase when brands use emoji on social media
higher email open rates with emoji in subject lines
Sources: Slack Workplace Report 2024, Adobe Emoji Trend Report, Mailchimp Analytics
Research shows that emoji are frequently misunderstood, especially across generations and cultures. Here are the emoji most likely to cause confusion:
Intended as prayer or gratitude. 70% of Western users think it is a high-five. In Japanese culture, it means "please" or "thank you."
Gen Z uses this to mean "laughing so hard I am crying." Older users interpret it as genuine sadness. Context is everything.
For Gen Z: "I am dead" (from laughing). For everyone else: death, danger, or Halloween. One of the biggest generational emoji divides.
The most passive-aggressive emoji. Often interpreted as "I am annoyed but being polite" rather than genuine happiness.
Gen Z considers it hostile or dismissive. Older generations see it as a friendly acknowledgment. In some Middle Eastern cultures, it is considered offensive.
Statistics on this page are compiled from the following sources. Numbers are approximate and represent the most recent publicly available data as of early 2025.