According to the Unicode Consortium, 92% of people online use emojis. That's easy to believe. Everywhere you look, there are emojis: on social networks, messaging apps, billboards, stores, and more. We're all addicted to the little colorful emoticons.

Now, the Unicode Consortium has revealed the most popular emojis of 2021. There are over 3,500 emojis available at your fingertips, but you'd be surprised at just how many go generally unused. So, has your favorite emoji made the top ten? Let's explore.

What Are the Top 10 Emojis of 2021?

The Unicode Consortium, a not-for-profit that maintains the universal character encoding standard, has published a report on how we used emojis in 2021. The last time it did this was in 2019. Interestingly, things haven't changed drastically since then.

In 2021, the most popular emojis were:

  1. 😂 Face with tears of joy
  2. ❤️ Red heart
  3. 🤣 Rolling on the floor laughing
  4. 👍 Thumbs up
  5. 😭 Loudly crying face
  6. 🙏 Folded hands
  7. 😘 Face blowing a kiss
  8. 🥰 Smiling face with hearts
  9. 😍 Smiling face with heart-eyes
  10. 😊 Smiling face with smiling eyes

The top emoji, face with tears of joy, accounts for over 5% of all emoji use. While the red heart comes close, none of the other emojis are anywhere near as popular. There's a right time to use emojis; perhaps the face with tears of joy is always applicable?

How Has Emoji Usage Changed?

The top emojis in 2019 were pretty similar to this year's. 💕 dropped out in favor of 🥰, for example, but both are themed around love.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic meant that health-related emojis like 🦠 and 😷 were used more in 2021 than 2019, though not by a significant amount.

Elsewhere, 🎂 moved from spot 113 to 25, 🎈 from 139 to 48, and 🥺 from 97 to 14. These emojis gained popularity in part because they were still relatively new in 2019; we've had time to acclimatize to them and figure out how to use them.

Overall, the flag category was the least popular, despite representing the largest collection of emojis—a whopping 258.

What Do All These Emojis Mean?

One of the great things about emojis is that they can all represent different things to different people. It depends on the context and whether you want to use them seriously or humorously. In many ways, emojis are the global language, and it'll be interesting to see how their usage changes in the years to come.