Towards the end of the year, the Unicode Consortium released a list of the 10 most used emojis of 2021. Unicode last released a list of the most popular emojis in 2019, so it's pretty interesting to see how they differ in two years.
Interestingly, this year's list of popular emoji hasn't changed much compared to 2019. The top two positions are still held by the laughing while crying emoji and the heart emoji.
Meanwhile, the laughing tumbling emoji moved up one place to number three, and the heart-eyes emoji dropped from number three to number nine. The full list of the 10 most popular emojis can be seen below:
2019: 😂 ❤️ 😍 😊 🙏 👍
2021: 😂 ❤️ 👍 🙏 😍 😊
In addition to the most popular emoji, Unicode also reveals some interesting statistics. For example, the most popular emojis are the birthday cake emoji (ranked 113 to 25) and the balloon emoji (ranked 139 to 48).
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Even though 2020 and 2021 were marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, only two health-related emojis made it to the top 100, namely and . The masked face emoji rose from 186 to 156, while the microbe emoji only made it to the top 500.
Unicode says the three most popular categories of emoji are smiley faces, flowers and emotions. Despite having the most types of emoji, flags seem to be the least popular emoji category.
"Least popular category? Flags. Least popular subcategory? Country flags," Unicode said in its report.
"That category represents the largest collection (258 emoji!), but the least used," he continued.
