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📅 Every year on July 17th, the world pauses for a moment, not to draft long texts or write eloquent messages, but to drop a little emoji that says it all.
World Emoji day. Picture: iStock
World Emoji Day celebrates the faces that speak louder than words
It’s World Emoji Day, and the tiny icons that once seemed like digital doodles are now a global language of laughter, love, and everything in between.
🌍 The emoji-volution
Believe it or not, emojis are younger than most millennials’ cellphone contracts. It all started in Japan in 1999 when Shigetaka Kurita created the very first emoji set, a modest 176 pictograms for a mobile internet platform.
These weren’t just cute icons; they were designed to convey emotional context where plain text fell flat.
However, emojis went global in 2011 when Apple introduced the emoji keyboard to iOS, closely followed by Android devices.
Suddenly, we had an arsenal of facial expressions, food items, zodiac signs, and strangely specific modes of transportation (why is there a canoe and a gondola?) to pepper our messages with.
📆 Why July 17th?
Look closely at the calendar emoji 📅 and you’ll notice something curious: the date displayed is July 17. That’s because it marks the launch of Apple’s iCal calendar app in 2002. When Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge noticed this, he declared July 17 as World Emoji Day back in 2014, and the internet ran with it.
Today, World Emoji Day is a real thing.
Brands use it to drop campaigns, social media goes wild, and sometimes even new emojis are announced. Yes, it’s a whole thing now, because why not?
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😂 The emoji GOAT
So, which emoji rules them all? According to Unicode Consortium (yes, the emoji overlords are real), the face with tears of joy 😂 consistently tops the list as the world’s most-used emoji.
Why? Because the internet loves irony, chaos, and laughing through the pain.
Other top contenders include the red heart ❤️, the rolling-on-the-floor-laughing 🤣, the pleading face 🥺, and the fire emoji 🔥, often used in compliments or when someone posts a selfie that melts timelines.
💬 More than just cute icons
Emojis aren’t just for giggles. They’re shaping the way we communicate. Studies show that using emojis in messages boosts engagement and makes digital convos feel more human. There has even been academic research into the semantics of emojis.
Yes, your PhD could be about whether the upside-down face means sarcasm or existential dread (spoiler: it’s both).
So go on, send a wink 😉, drop a confetti cannon 🎉, or passive-aggressively end your text with a thumbs up 👍.
After all, it’s World Emoji Day, and these tiny symbols are doing big things.
