Jun 13 | By Lauren Chapman
Before written language was invented, our early ancestors carved symbols and pictures into stone. ⚒️⛏️
Over time, countless words and languages were invented. We wrote books and plays and kept a written history on paper. 📜📚
Now, in the age where so much of our communication happens through the internet, phones, and other digital media, we’ve come full circle. We’ve gone back to communicating with symbols and pictures like our ancient ancestors. 📱💻
That’s right: emojis. 🙂
Emojis are now an essential part of everyday communication. Texts and instant messages are a convenient way to keep in touch, but it’s hard to convey emotion in quick bits of typed-out text. Emojis enhance our messages and clarify the emotions we are trying to convey. They can even communicate meaning all by themselves. Sometimes a few simple faces or symbols can get a message across just as well as a full sentence. A picture is worth a thousand words, after all.
As emojis become more a part of our daily communication, more emojis are created, allowing for more specific meanings, ideas, identities, and personalities to be represented in symbols. It’s obvious that emojis are here to stay, which made us wonder:
Which emojis are being used the most?
The top 10 emojis in the United States
The “face with tears of joy” emoji was by far the most popular emoji across the entire United States with over 180 million mentions in a year. It was used over 60 million more times than the “loudly crying” emoji in second place and more than twice as many total times as the “red heart” in third place. It makes sense, since laughter, sadness, and love are some of our strongest emotions.
Interesting Findings
According to emojistats.org, the most used emoji is the “face with tears of joy” or 
In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries named the “face with tears of joy” emoji the Word of the Year, so it’s been a popular choice for a while.
While we only looked at the top 20 most popular emojis (and only 14 made it to the final list), there are over 3,000 emojis.
World Emoji Day is an unofficial holiday celebrated on July 17 every year!
Methodology
We used emojistats.org and a list of the most popular emojis from Brandwatch to determine the most popular emojis in the nation. From there we used the Brandwatch tool to scrape Twitter and determine which were the top 10 emojis (based on our combined list) for all 50 states, not including the District of Columbia. Because the “face with tears of joy” emoji was the most popular in every state, our map shows the second most popular emoji for each state. The data is from May 26, 2020 to May 27, 2021.Show 102550100 entriesSearch:
| State | 2nd Most Popular Emoji | Number of Mentions |
|---|---|---|
| Alabama | 😭 | 863,408 |
| Alaska | 😭 | 118,613 |
| Arizona | 😭 | 1,263,449 |
| Arkansas | 😭 | 435,049 |
| California | 😭 | 13,239,861 |
| Colorado | 👀 | 814,206 |
| Connecticut | 😭 | 833,265 |
| Delaware | 😭 | 218,234 |
| Florida | 😭 | 7,177,750 |
| Georgia | 😭 | 5,933,224 |
Showing 1 to 10 of 50 entries
Conclusion
Emojis are a part of our everyday communication. They help us share emotions in our online communications and can represent a huge variety of different meanings with just a single, simple symbol. In just a short amount of time we’ve seen them evolve, take on new meanings, and become increasingly diverse. There’s no doubt that the most popular emojis will change over time, just like the way we communicate will surely change as well.
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