The "laugh out loud" 😂 face is officially the world's most popular emoji, according to researchers from Adobe who surveyed 7,000 users across the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Australia, and South Korea.
Millennials and Gen Zers in the United States may not think the "laughing" emoji 😂 is cool anymore, but a majority of emoji users around the world disagree, according to a new study.
The "laugh out loud" 😂 face is officially the world's most popular emoji, according to researchers from Adobe who surveyed 7,000 users across the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Australia, and South Korea.
The "thumbs up" 👍 emoji came in second, followed by the "red heart" ❤️ emoji. The flirtatious "wink and kiss"😘 and "sad face with a tear" 😢 emoji respectively rounded out the top five.
The software maker on Thursday released the findings from its 2021 Global Emoji Trend Report ahead of World Emoji Day on Saturday.
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Of course, TikTok users have had it out over the "laugh out loud" 😂 emoji, which Gen Zers argued is cliché and uncool.
"I use everything but the laughing emoji," 21-year-old Walid Mohammed told CNN Business earlier this year. "I stopped using it a while back because I saw older people using it, like my mom, my older siblings and just older people in general."
Abode's latest Emoji Trend report also examined the three most misunderstood emojis in the world. The "eggplant" 🍆 symbol edged out the "peach" 🍑 and the "clown" 🤡 emoji respectively as the most confusing for users.
The vast majority of emoji users (90%) believe the modern-day hieroglyphs make it easier for them to express themselves. Eighty-nine percent of respondents said emoji simplify communicating across language barriers. And 67% said they think people who use emoji are friendlier, funnier and cooler than those who don't.
A slight majority of respondents said they are more comfortable expressing emotions through emoji than talking on the phone or in-person. More than half of global emoji users (55%) said using emoji in communications has positively impacted their mental health.
Seventy-six percent of those surveyed said emoji are an important communication tool for creating unity, respect and understanding. And 88% said they feel more empathetic toward people who use emoji.
"I am encouraged by this particular statistic," Adobe typeface designer and font developer Paul D. Hunt wrote in a blog post about the study. "Emoji sometimes get criticized for being overly saccharine, but this sweetness is key when it comes to diffusing some of the heaviness of online communication."
Hieroglyphics and other symbols before emojis
Why we love emojis
While some folks initially dismissed emojis as an infantile trend, people around the world began adopting the Japanese invention as the symbols were able to fill a void present in the written word. With so much communication now happening via text messages, chat and emails rather than face-to-face communications, conversations were missing the nonverbal cues that gestures, facial expressions, sighs and winks could communicate. Though online communication is new, people have been relying on pictures to convey both simple and complex ideas since the dawn of mankind.
Cave paintings
Cave art left by ancient humans has been discovered around the world, with the oldest European sites dating to before the Ice Age, which was more than 14,000 years ago, to the time of Neanderthals more than 65,000 years ago. Using black or red pigments, carving or engraving, people depicted men and animals, especially formidable now-extinct species such as cave lions, woolly rhinoceroses and mammoths. Cave drawings are perhaps the first manifestation of our creativity and use of symbolism.
Oracle bone script
Oracle bone script is the earliest form of Chinese writing that was carved into animal bones and shells circa 1000 BC. The developed pictographic language served as documentation of important events. The bones were also used for divination. While the cuneiform languages of the Middle East can be traced back further, they evolved from solely using pictograms to employing shapes to denote sounds, becoming a phonetic rather than purely symbolic language.
Hieroglyphics
While not the world's oldest language, hieroglyphics are perhaps the most famous ancient means of communication. Egyptian hieroglyphic writing is composed entirely of pictures and dates back more than 4,000 years but its use died out by 394 AD. The symbols were specifically used to adorn temples and monuments. While some symbols were apparent, others were impossible to translate until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799. Much like modern emojis, hieroglyphics could have a literal meaning as well as a nuanced meaning. According to Britannica, a picture of a man holding his hand to his mouth could mean "eat" or something along the lines of "put in a sock in it."
Logograms
Logograms are letters or symbols that represent an entire word rather than a sound. These include hieroglyphs and Chinese as well as numbers, symbols for currency such as $, and shorthand such as &, @ and %.
Ideograms
More complex than logograms, ideograms are pictures or symbols that represent an idea or abstract concept. Many of these are understood across languages and cultures, such as the man in a wheelchair that indicates accessibility or the walk figure and stop hand at crosswalks.
Gestures
The nonverbal cues we give each other, such as a smile or nod, are enhanced by gestures, which are symbols we make with our bodies to convey meaning. Common gestures you probably use regularly include the thumbs up, the OK sign, pointing and counting on your fingers, but gestures can also communicate more complex thoughts, such as "check please," "come over here," "go away" or "just a little bit."
Sign language
One theory is that humans' spoken language evolved from gestures. In fact, babies are able to learn sign language before they're able to talk, so it's no wonder a language was created based on series of gestures. Predominantly used by people who are unable to communicate verbally or have hearing impairments and their loved ones, sign language uses complex hand gestures and postures to communicate. It's completely different from country to country in terms of vocabulary, grammar, "pronunciation" and more. American Sign Language is made up of thousands of nuanced signs for words and ideas as well as an alphabet for fingerspelling.
Wingdings
An evolution of the dingbat symbols that used to be included in printer's typesets to be used as ornamentation, the digital font wingdings was originally developed in 1990 by Microsoft. Even then the company saw the need for people to include symbols in their communication. Each letter on the computer keyboard corresponded to a common symbol that could be incorporated into text, such as a folder or mailbox icon. The next evolution of this word processor font was webdings, which allowed use of symbols when typing online.
Emoticons
Before emojis, there were emoticons, which were first used in 1982. Computer users began packing punctuation marks, numbers and letters together to create a facial representation when viewed vertically, such as the happy face :-), the frowning face :-(, the crying face :'(, the smiling face :D and the heart <3. These combos of standard symbols were used to convey emotion in a text-only medium, and the "language" organically became more complex and nuanced as computer usage grew.
Kaomoji
Emoticons evolved beyond Western keyboard symbols thanks to symbol users in Japan, who added Japanese characters and grammar punctuations to create even more expressive shorthand that could be read horizontally rather than vertically called kaomoji. These made their way from anime and Japan-centric forums to the mainstream, especially the shrug kaomoji. Some, like the uwu face, were adapted to Western keyboards or referred to by nicknames.
Stickers
Stickers are detailed cartoon graphics that can be used like emoji but function more like reactions as they can employ movement, sound and text. While emojis are more like an alphabet and are available as a universal keyboard, stickers are often proprietary, developed by specific messaging services and featuring cute characters that can be monetized. Kim Kardashian's "Kimojis" could be more aptly described as a downloadable sticker pack. And apps like Korea's KakaoTalk and Japan's Line have created entire stores of merchandise from backpacks to umbrellas and swimsuits based on their sticker characters, Kakao Friends and Line Friends, which have the following of icons like Hello Kitty.
The future of emojis
While new emojis are introduced every year, it's still very much the Wild West when it comes to developing image-based means of communications. Different companies are trying to develop the next big thing. A former front-runner was "custom emojis," which are more like custom stickers, an option available on messaging apps like Line as well as stand-alone apps like Imoji. But now Apple is entering the ring with Animoji, an "animated emoji" function available on the iPhone X that uses a dot projector in the front-facing camera to seamlessly superimpose Snapchat-like filters of popular emoji, such as the unicorn or the smiling poop, on your face so that you effectively become the emoji and can control its expression with your own.
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