Celebrating World Emoji Day – What’s Your Favorite, Suncoast?

Communication these days looks much different than generations before. Sure, the written word never fully goes out of style, but in the age of social media, text messages, and such – emojis are the communication form of the new age. Symbols and pictures that each of us recognizes as a shorthand of sorts for emotions, sayings, and stringing them together, sometimes entire sentences, have become the norm. Today is the unofficial day to recognize our favorite emoji and maybe test our knowledge a bit on symbols that are not so well known.

Emojis help us better understand something visually when things can get lost in translation through words. In the Internet Age, they help us communicate visually and sometimes better than we can with words. They trigger more emotional responses, and to be honest, they’re cute and kind of addicting to use, but they serve a much greater purpose. They improve our capacity to communicate effectively with others and make our intended meaning known. When in doubt, emoji it out!

Just some of the facts about World Emoji Day you might not know:

• Since 2017, Apple has used each World Emoji Day to announce upcoming expansions to the range of emojis on iOS.
• Emoji was first invented in 1999 but not commonly adopted until 2011.
• In 2018, Kim Kardashian released her Kimoji fragrance line on World Emoji Day.
• Over 100 tweets per minute are typically sent using the #WorldEmojiDay hashtag during the event – with it rising to over 175 tweets per minute at peak times.
• Over 10 billion emojis are sent every day.
• The day was created by Jeremy Burge, the founder of Emojipedia, in 2014. Burge chose July 17 as the date for World Emoji Day because it is the date that appears on the calendar emoji. 
• In 2015, the Oxford English Dictionary named the “face with tears of joy” emoji as its word of the year.

So what is your favorite one to send? Take a guess at how many of these visual add-ons you will use on this single day between texts and social media. The most used emoji is the “Face with Tears of Joy” and has billions of uses on record across all internet platforms. Whether happy, joyful, angry, or just confused – there is an emoji for that. It is hard to imagine just how many combinations and usages we will have in another ten years, but for just a moment today, let’s celebrate the new visual language we all love to communicate in – emoji!

Photos Courtesy of Deposit Photos