What’s New on World Emoji Day 2021

Keith Broni

Jul 17, 2021 • 3 min read

Happy World Emoji Day! Held on July 17 every year, here’s our quick rundown on the day, and what has been announced this year. 🌎📅🥳

Why July 17th? It's all about the 📅 Calendar emoji:

Q: Which came first?
👉July 17 on the 📅 Calendar emoji, or
👉 #WorldEmojiDay on July 17

A: 📅 Calendar emoji.

Apple's calendar emoji has shown July 17 since 2012, two years before the first #WorldEmojiDay. The date originally stems from the iCal for Mac launch in 2002. pic.twitter.com/0NkKKdnIUX
— Emojipedia 📅 (@Emojipedia) July 17, 2021

As for today's unfolding festivities, I've curated the day's most interesting announcements, statistics, and awards-oriented happenings below. 👇

📣 Announcements

Google have announced that new emoji designs coming to a variety of their platforms (including Gmail!), but more importantly a way to ensure old Android phones get updates.

Microsoft revealed a cute new 3D emoji set. A select number of these are currently available now their Flipgrid social learning platform, with the full set coming to Microsoft Teams and Windows later this year. 🎨

Skype's set of animated emoticons are now displayed on Emojipedia alongside their Unicode-equivalent emojis. 🥳

Above: Microsoft's new emoji designs, announced ahead of World Emoji Day 2021.

👀 New Emojis

Emoji 14.0 is due for approval this September. What better time than World Emoji Day to look ahead to the final candidates, to get a feel for what might be on phones in 2021-2022.

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A post shared by 📙 Emojipedia (@emojipedia)

📈 Statistics

There’s a lot of statistics around right now! Here’s some that jumped out to me:

Emoji use is at an all time high. I measured this myself, analyzing over 6.7 billion tweets. 🧮
Most Popular New Emoji. This was determined based on Twitter data from 2021, with ❤️‍🔥 Heart on Fire being the most popular of every emoji added in the last year.
😭 Loudly Crying Face has become the #1 emoji for several months now, based again on Twitter data. This is new data from July 2021. To honor it finally overtaking the previously-dominant 😂 Face with Tears of Joy, 😭 Loudly Crying Face was given a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Adobe have released an emoji trend report. Some interesting stats in here, notably that 55% of people are more comfortable expressing emotion through emoji than phone conversations, and that 89% agree that emojis make it easier for them to communicate across language barriers. You might have seen that it lists 😂 Face with Tears of Joy as people's favourite emoji, whereas our analysis showed 😭 Loudly Crying Face is the most used. This could just be down to methodology: Adobe is using a survey, while we're using Twitter data.

🏆 Awards

This year's World Emoji Awards results are in, with the following four winners:

The Most Anticipated Emoji is the Melting Face emoji, a current draft candidate for Emoji 14.0.
❤️‍🔥 Heart on Fire is the Most Popular New Emoji
😭 Loudly Crying Face has received a a Lifetime Achievement Award.
After an incredibly close battle, the The Most 2021 Emoji is the 💉 Syringe, just about overcoming the 🦠 Microbe (a little too real, if you ask me).

awards

👀 More on World Emoji Day

While World Emoji Day always has interesting news, announcements and sometimes events or activities, that's not everything.

There's a lot that happens on World Emoji Day 2021 that is purely in the side of being a fun distraction on social media.

#WorldEmojiDay in jerz
___________
/⛰ 🍕 / 🏙
/🐢🍕🚄/ 🗽
/ ⛰🛬⛽/__ 🌊
\ 🚧 🥯🏖| 🌊
\🏛️🌲🏖| 🌊
/ 🎢🎡⛱️| 🌊
/ 🌲🥯🐢/ 🌊
/ 🚢 🐎 🫐/ 🌊
\ 🌽🍅 🐎/ 🌊
\ 🌽🍅 / 🌊
/ / 🌊
/_/ 🌊
— New Jersey (@NJGov) July 17, 2021

The playful side of World Emoji Day isn't generally covered in detail here on Emojipedia, but to see what's been happening the best place is the #WorldEmojiDay hashtag on your social platform of choice.

Or check out the official World Emoji Day accounts:

...and of course the websites: