💬 The Wrap
Today (July 17, 2023) is not only our 10th annual World Emoji Day, but it's also the 10th anniversary of Emojipedia's founding! 🌎🥳📅
In honor of these two momentous events, Zedge - a global leader in creating platforms for digital self-expression (including Emojipedia!) - is throwing the biggest global celebration yet. Festivities include ringing the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange, a charitable partnership and social media campaign with Conscious Alliance, and of course revealing new insights into how emoji use over the last 10 years, such as detailing our favorite viral emoji trends and celebrity-emoji associations, as well as dynamically graphing the world's most popular emojis over time. 🔔💙📈
These celebrations have also of course included our annual unveiling of sample designs for the emoji candidates expected to be approved by Unicode later this year. As shown above, these include a Phoenix, a Lime, two shaking heads (one horizontally, the other vertically) as well as over 100 direction-specific versions of different people emojis. ✨🆕✨
Additionally, we've been rolling out a brand-new version of our Emojipedia site. More and more users will begin to see the site in the near future, but those wanting to explore it right now can do so here. 😃📙🧡
Plus, the costly ramifications of a 👍 Thumbs Up, the recent viral jump in the 🤸 Person Cartwheeling, and how our brains may be comprehending emojis more swiftly than actual facial expressions - all within this bumper World Emoji Day edition of the Emoji Wrap! 🌯📯
✨ New Emojis
🎨 New Emojis in 2023-2024
A total of 118 new emojis are on the current Emoji 15.1 draft list. Amongst them are six brand new concepts (e.g. Phenoix, Lime), four new non-gender-specific family emojis, and over a hundred new direction-specifying people emojis of different genders and skin tones.
All of these new emoji candidates are discussed here in detail.
📰 News
🥳 10 Years of Emojipedia, 10 Years of Record-Breaking Emoji Popularity
In honor of a decade of both Emojipedia and World Emoji Day, we conducted a deep dive into global emoji usage across Twitter.
Our research has allowed us to reveal the world's most popular emojis when we were founded in 2013, the growth of emoji use on the platform since that time, and dynamically graph the top ten emojis across various popular categories over the last 10 years, alongside other emoji insights.
👍 Canadian judge rules thumbs-up emoji can represent contract agreement
Earlier this month, in an event that was widely covered by global media outlets, a 👍 Thumbs Up emoji cost a Canadian farmer a very hefty sum of money when a judge ruled that it meant the farmer in question had agreed to a contract that had been shared with them but subsequently failed to deliver upon.
📨 Telegram's Animated Emoji Set
Over the last number of years the messaging platform Telegram has slowly been releasing animated versions of Apple's emoji designs.
These animated designs can now all be viewed on Emojipedia, alongside other animated emoji sets by Microsoft, Google, and JoyPixels (as well as WhatsApp at some point in the near future).
🗺️ Better Emoji Exploration with New Emojipedia Frontend Features
As mentioned above, we're currently in the process of rolling out a major update to the Emojipedia site.
This update includes a whole host of new exploration features to our unrivaled archive of emoji info, as well as improving core existing features and site speed.
💭 Interesting
🤸 ‘Bakit malungkot beshie ko?’: How the viral meme featuring cartwheeling emojis started
Thanks to a viral clip from an episode of the Philippine television drama anthology show Magpakailanman, the 🤸 Person Cartwheeling briefly became one of our most popular Emojipedia site pages. This news article details how this came to pass.
🧠 People are better at decoding emojis compared to real facial expressions, study finds
Earlier this month an Italian research study found that people were faster at recognizing the emotions displayed by emojis compared to those displayed by real facial expressions.
Guess it's not just us that have emojis on the brain.
🫡 10 Years of Viral Emoji Moments
Over the last 10 years, we here at Emojipedia have borne witness to many different viral emoji trends.
Here we detail our favorite ten, which involve the 🫡 Saluting Face, the 👏 Clapping Hands, the ✨ Sparkles, and the creepy 👁👄👁 emoji combination
💜 10 Years of Celebrity-Emoji Associations
As with the viral emoji trends, here we detail our top 10 favorite associations between emojis and different celebrities over the years, making reference to the likes of the 🐝 Honeybee, 🤠 Cowboy Hat Face, 💜 Purple Heart, and 🐐 Goat emojis.
🎙 Podcasts
🗣️ Curiology (EMOJI) with Various Emoji Experts
Leading into World Emoji Day we took part in Alie Ward's incredibly popular Ologies podcast.
The two-part episode also features Google emoji designer and Unicode Emoji Subcommittee Chairperson Jennifer Daniel, as well as Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge.
🗓 Events
🔔 Zedge (NYSE American: ZDGE) Rings The Opening Bell®
As mentioned above, Zedge will be ringing the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange later today in honor of World Emoji Day.
🤗 Lastly
That does it for this bumper World Emoji Day 2023 edition of the Emoji Wrap! 🌯📯
To keep up with everything that's happening throughout the day, you can read about all the happenings on the Emojipedia blog, use the #WorldEmojiDay hashtag or follow our official accounts:
You can follow Emojipedia on Twitter, as well as the members of our Emojipedia team:
- 📚 Senior Emoji Lexicographer Jane Solomon
- 🎮 World Emoji Day social team coordinator Chris Brandrick
- 🎨 Head of Sample Emoji Design Joshua Jones
- 📰 And me, Emojipedia's Editor In Chief Keith Broni