World Emoji Day!! 🤗

Today is World Emoji Day.  Did you realize there was such a thing?  When I heard about it, I decided it was a great topic to blog about.  Who doesn’t like emojis?  😘

Emoji Facts

Here are some facts about emojis:

• The first emoji was created in 1998 or 1999
• Emojis originated in Japan
• As of a year ago, there were 2,623 official unicode emojis
• 25-29 year olds are the most frequent users of emojis
• Nearly half of all Instagram comments contain an emoji
• 60 million is the average number of emojis sent on Facebook every day
• There are 1,507 people and/or Smiley emojis
• There are 113 animal and nature emojis
• There are 102 food and drink emojis
• 78% of internet-using women and 60% of internet-using men are frequent emoji users
• 157 new emojis were approved in 2018, which brings the total to 2,823
• 157 new emojis are expected to arrive in the last half of 2018 (here’s an article about that)
• Most tweeted emoji (as of March 2016) is Tears of Joy 😂

World Emoji Awards (2017)

• Best New Emoji:
  • Winner – 🤦‍♀️(Person facepalming)
  • Second place – 🤣(Rolling on the floor laughing)
  • Third place – 🤷‍♀️(Person shrugging)
• Most Anticipated Emoji:
  • Winner – 🏴(Flag for Wales) – anyone understand why???
  • Second place – 🤨(Face with raised eyebrow)
  • Third place – 🤫 (Shushing face)
• Lifetime Achievement:
  • Winner – 😂(Face with tears of joy)
  • Second place – 💩(Pile of poo)
  • Third place – 🤔(Thinking face)

So, who’s in charge of emojis?

Here’s a good article about that (even though it’s four years old so some of the stats are out of date), with my summary below.

• Unicode, a standard designed to make character encoding consistent across the world, was the solution to providing emojis everyone could use, regardless of software. Unicode’s official goal is to provide “a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language.”
• Supporting emoji, as well as the specific design of the emoji characters, is up to software makers.
• Emoji characters don’t have to look the same everywhere they are used.  The Unicode standard merely offers a description, a Unicode code (such as U+1F36E) and a basic pictograph. It’s up to operating system creators and font makers to customize the emoji as they see fit.  That’s why emoji look different depending on what platform you’re using.
• Of the various emoji sets in wide-use, Apple’s are probably closer to the “official” method.
• The Unicode Consortium is responsible for deciding which emoji get added to the Unicode spec.  After the Unicode Consortium adopts new emoji to its standards base, it’s up to operating system makers to support emoji as they see fit.
• Go here to request a new emoji.  (It’s not an easy process.)

My favorite emojis

Based on my phone usage, these are some of my favorites.  I really don’t use that many on a consistent basis.

Faces – 😉☺😘🤗😋🙁😿

Others – 🎈❤🎁🎉🎂

Here are some that I think are fun and I’m going to try to use in the future.  Sometimes it’s hard to know what’s even available, so it was kind of fun going through the entire list.  I went through the list available on my laptop to find these.  They’re slightly different from what I see on my phone and iPad and I wonder if there are more options on those two devices.

🌽😍👌🤞😜🐈🦕🦐🐣🎃🎄🎾🎳💵💰📌✂📎🥨🍦🍭🥂🍉🍒🍓🥑🥕🌷🌼🌱🌴🍂🚦🏖🏝☀🌈⛄❄☔💨✔💭

Missing emojis?

Are there any emojis you would like to use if they were available?  I tried to find something for knitting recently and there’s nothing.  In fact, I don’t think there are any for any type of needlework.

I did find something called Craftmoji.  To get these, you have to load an app on your iPhone.  It costs $.99.  Aren’t they cute?  But I tried to find it on my phone in the app store and I don’t see it.  There’s something called Knitting Art and Craft Stickers but it doesn’t look like what I see below.  And the same for something called Sew It Up Stickers.  Well, that’s a bummer.  ☹

So, I kept looking and there is an app called Knitting Emoticons, also for $.99.  But it sounds like it can be a little complicated to use and probably not available in everything.

I did check the list of future emojis and they say they will have “thread” and “yarn”.  Not a lot but two are better than none!!

Getting creative with emojis

If you’re interested, you should check out this article about a couple of tweets from Roger Federer three years ago.  He’s known for sending out tweets using just emojis.  Isn’t that clever?  This is supposed to represent what he did on his day off.  Can you figure it out?  Wish I were this creative.  🤨

What emojis do you like?

Ok, if you’ve made it this far, I’d like to hear from you.  Do you use emojis?  If not, why not?  They are so fun.

If you do, please comment to let me know which you like and recommend.

👇