World Emoji Day 2025: What's the most popular emoji?

Which emojis do you use every day?

Happy, sad, silly, you probably use emoji every day messaging your mates - but did you know they are celebrated each year?

July 17 is Emoji day - chosen because that is the date shown on most calendar emojis.

The first emoji were invented by Japanese designer Shigetaka Kurita in 1999, and have since become so popular that around 10 billion are sent every day!

This year is the twelfth Emoji Day - find out more about the symbols, including the all-time most popular emojis, below.

What is the most used emoji?

Each emoji has to be approved by Unicode Consortium - a group who decide which new emoji characters should be introduced.

With 3,521 to chose from it can sometimes be hard to know which one to use, but here are the top three used most often, according to emoji experts, Emojipedia.

Red heart

At number one, it's the classic red heart. It shows you love someone or something, what a nice one to send! According to Emojipedia it's the most popular of all time - the "most beloved of all emojis, old or new."

Loudly crying face

The second most common emoji at the moment according to Emojipedia is the loud crying face. The most obvious thing it's used for is for when you're upset, but it's often used as a way of showing crying with laughter, too. What's the last thing you found so funny you cried this hard?

Fire

At number three is the fire emoji. If something is described as flames it means it's good, so you might be sending this if you like your friend's outfit or you're talking about a new hit single you like.

Where does the word emoji come from?

Shigetaka Kurita, inventor of the emoji

You may think that emoji has something to do with conveying emotion, however the similarity in the two words is entirely coincidental.

The word is actually Japanese, combining the kanji for picture and character.

The first work is picture, which is 絵, and is pronounced eh. Letter, or character in Japanese is 文字, and is pronounced mōji.

What existed before emojis?

You may still use shorthand like this when chatting with your friends

A word that did actually come from emotion is emoticon.

These were used before emojis existed.

Essentially, people would type different punctuation symbols, numbers and letters to resemble different emotions.

For example, when typed a colon and a close bracket looks like a smiley face, so it would be used to convey happiness :)

How are new emojis created and approved?

A non-profit organisation called Unicode Consortium are in charge of the creation of new emojis.

Anyone can submit a proposal, and then Unicode look at them all and decide which to make.

Their decisions are based on how many people across the world would recognise them and use them, among other things.

Once approved, they're added to the Unicode Standard, and then companies like Apple and Google can choose to add them to their devices.