10 Years of Emojipedia, 10 Years of Record-Breaking Emoji Popularity

This day next week, Emojipedia will be celebrating two significant milestones: not only will we be hosting our 10th annual World Emoji Day, but July 17 2023 also marks ten years since Emojipedia's founding.

Keith Broni

Jul 10, 2023 • 8 min read

Want to know what an emoji means? http://t.co/AB5S7Gk3kz is your answer.
— Emojipedia (@Emojipedia) July 17, 2013

To kick off our celebrations, we've crunched some numbers from Twitter and can reveal a host of emoji insights from across the 10 years since our founder Jeremy Burge sent that first tweet, including announcing a new global peak in emoji usage in 2023.

But first, let's take a step back in time and see what were the most popular emojis in the world when Emojipedia was created in July 2013,

📙 Twitter's Top 10 Emojis: July 2013

So, as shown above, the top emojis on Twitter ten years ago were:

Note that these figures are "per 10,000 tweets". This means that for every 10,000 tweets, 62 contained at least one instance of the 😂 Face with Tears of Joy emoji - or one in every 161 tweets (0.62%).

However, according to our data collected during the early stages of 2023, 😂 Face with Tears of Joy now appears at least once in one in every 45 tweets (2.24%) - an increase of 261.29%. This begs the question - how has overall emoji use increased on Twitter since the founding of Emojipedia?

📈 Overall Emoji Use on Twitter: 2013-2023

Back in July 2013, just roughly 4 of every 100 tweets contained at least one emoji (4.25%) - so one in every 25 tweets featured one instance of 😂 Face with Tears of Joy, 😍 Smiling Face with Heart-Eyes, 😘 Face Blowing a Kiss, or any of the other roughly 720 emoji character recommended by Unicode at the time (from Unicode 6.1).

But over the last 10 years, this has grown exponentially: data collected during March 2023 indicated that almost 27 out of every 100 tweets (26.7%) contained at least one of the now 3,664 emoji characters (as of September 2022's Emoji 15.0 recommendations).

This incredible growth over the last 10 years is charted below, with March 2023 being the highest recorded rate of emoji usage on Twitter: a new record since we here at Emojipedia last reported on Twitter emoji usage ahead of World Emoji Day 2022.

In fact, every month since July 2022 set a brand new all-time record for emoji use on Twitter, as shown above. Furthermore, when you compare January 2013 to March 2023 within the chart above, this shows an overall increase in emoji use of roughly 724%.

😂 Twitter's Top 10 Emojis: 2023

So, with this incredible growth in emoji use over the last 10 years, what are the most popular emojis in the world today? Below is the data we were last able to collect from Twitter during the early months of 2023.

The most popular emojis during the earlier stages of 2023 were as follows:

While the 2023 top 10 shows more variety across different emoji categories, with inclusions from hearts (❤️ Red Heart), gestures (🙏 Folded Hands), and symbols (✨ Sparkles and 🔥 Fire), it's clear that smiley emojis remain the most popular category across the globe.

Furthermore, despite at one time being overtaken by the 😭 Loudly Crying Face on the platform, the 😂 Face with Tears of Joy is now once again apparently dominant, as it was back in 2013.

In fact, the 😭 Loudly Crying Face is now in the distant fifth position, and the once-hotly-tipped 🥺 Pleading Face no longer appears within the top ten (according to our data, it has fallen into 15th place). How did this all pan out, both recently, but also over the last 10 years? To answer this, we specifically charted the rise and fall of Twitter's top 10 smiley emojis on a month-by-month basis between March 2013 and March 2023.

💕 Top 10 Emojis Across Categories: 2013-2023

The chart below, showing the top 10 smiley emojis across Twitter over the last 10 years, clearly outlines the extreme dominance of the 😂 Face with Tears of Joy between January 2013 and March 2021, and once again from January 2022 until today.

But while they are the most popular emoji category, we can't let the smileys have all the fun, and so we've also charted the top 10 emojis across the popular heart, gesture, animal, and food & drink emoji categories over the last 10 years also.

Let's start with the top heart emojis between 2013 and 2023, including ❤️ Red Heart, 💕 Two Hearts, 💙 Blue Heart, and 💜 Purple Heart.

Next are the various gesture emojis, such as 👌 OK Hand, 🙏 Folded Hands, 👍 Thumbs Up, and 👏 Clapping Hands.

Now, the top animal emojis like 🙈 See-No-Evil Monkey, 😺 Grinning Cat, 🐶 Dog Face, and 🦋 Butterfly.

Finally, here are the top food and drink emojis between 2013 and 2023, which include ☕ Hot Beverage, 🎂 Birthday Cake, and, ahem, 🍆 Eggplant.

🤣 Top 10 New Emojis: 2013-2023

As mentioned above, when Emojipedia was founded there were just over 700 emojis recommended for inclusion on our emoji keyboards by Unicode.

Today, there are 3,664 emojis recommended for general interchange (RGI). The increase between October 2010's Unicode 6.0 and September 2022's Emoji 15.0 recommendations is graphed below.

April 2012's Unicode 6.1 was the last update to feature the recommendation of new emoji characters prior to July 2013, with June 2014's Unicode 7.0 being the first new batch of emojis recommended after Emojipedia's launch.

Therefore emojis recommended from Unicode 7.0 onwards are eligible for our review of the most popular new emojis added since July 2013. We've graphed this in two ways below.

First, we've graphed the top 10 most popular emojis added since the founding of Emojipedia on their cumulative use between July 2013 and March 2023.

🤣 Rolling on the Floor Laughing (added June 2016 in Emoji 3.0 and Unicode 9.0)
🥺 Pleading Face (added June 2018 in Emoji 11.0 and Unicode 11.0)
🤔 Thinking Face (added June 2015 in Unicode 8.0, added to Emoji 1.0 in August 2015)
🥰 Smiling Face with Hearts (added June 2018 in Emoji 11.0 and Unicode 11.0)
🙄 Face with Rolling Eyes (added June 2015 in Unicode 8.0, added to Emoji 1.0 in August 2015)
🤦 Person Facepalming (added June 2016 in Emoji 3.0 and Unicode 9.0)
🤗 Smiling Face with Open Hands (added June 2015 in Unicode 8.0, added to Emoji 1.0 in August 2015)
🤷 Person Shrugging (added June 2016 as part of Emoji 3.0 and Unicode 9.0)
🤍 White Heart (added March 2019 as part of Emoji 12.0 and Unicode 12.0)
🤤 Drooling Face (added June 2016 as part of Emoji 3.0 and Unicode 9.0)

Unsurprisingly based on what we've seen in our data analyses thus far, the majority of these new emoji designs are smileys. What perhaps was not to be expected was the presence of three emojis added from 2018 onwards - this means of the most popular emojis added since 2013, three reached this cumulative level of popularity at most across the last 5 years.

With this in mind, we reviewed which of the emojis added since July 2013 are the most popular across just 2023 (specifically January to March 2023).

🤣 Rolling on the Floor Laughing (added June 2016 in Emoji 3.0 and Unicode 9.0)
🥰 Smiling Face with Hearts (added June 2018 in Emoji 11.0 and Unicode 11.0)
🥺 Pleading Face (added June 2018 in Emoji 11.0 and Unicode 11.0)
🥹 Face Holding Back Tears (added September 2021 in Emoji 14.0 and Unicode 14.0)
🤔 Thinking Face (added June 2015 in Unicode 8.0, added to Emoji 1.0 in August 2015)
🫶 Heart Hands (added September 2021 in Emoji 14.0 and Unicode 14.0)
🤦 Person Facepalming (added June 2016 in Emoji 3.0 and Unicode 9.0)
🤍 White Heart (added March 2019 as part of Emoji 12.0 and Unicode 12.0)
🤗 Smiling Face with Open Hands (added June 2015 in Unicode 8.0, added to Emoji 1.0 in August 2015)
🤭 Face with Hand Over Mouth (added September 2021 in Emoji 14.0 and Unicode 14.0)

📝 In Summary

📈 Global emoji use on Twitter has increased by approximately 724% between the start of 2013 (the year Emojipedia was founded) and 2023.
🏆 Each month between July 2022 and March 2023 saw a new record-breaking level of emoji use on Twitter.
The most popular emoji in the world today is still the 😂 Face with Tears of Joy emoji, as was the case when Emojipedia was created in July 2013.
The only emoji to ever overcome the 😂 Face with Tears of Joy emoji on Twitter, the 😭 Loudly Crying Face, is now a distance 5th, behind the 🤣 Rolling on the Floor Laughing, ❤️ Red Heart, and 🙏 Folded Hands emojis.
The ❤️ Red Heart emoji is by far and away the most popular of the heart emojis in 2023, followed by the 💙 Blue Heart and the 💕 Two Hearts (the latter of which was the top heart emoji in early 2013).
The 👌 OK Hand emoji was once the most popular gesture emoji on Twitter, but 🙏 Folded Hands and 👍 Thumbs Up are firmly within the #1 and #2 positions today.
🆕 The most popular new emoji added to our emoji keyboards since the founding of Emojipedia, both today and over time, is the 🤣 Rolling on the Floor Laughing emoji. It is also the #2 most popular emoji in the world in 2023.
😃 The top emojis across the globe have become more diverse across emoji categories since July 2013 (now featuring gestures like 🙏 Folded Hands and symbols such as ❤️ Red Heart and ✨ Sparkles), though smiley emojis still make up the majority of the global top 10.