Most popular emojis of 2021

This year is about to end and although the whole world was not confined due to the still existing pandemic, mobile devices and technology continue to lead the way in everyday life.

Learn how to activate the secret emoji of WhatsApp

Several technological events have taken place in the year 2021 with new advances, launches, reforms and more, under the concept of inclusion, equality, and non-discrimination. This also happens with the peculiar little drawings that we add to our texts of chats on the phone in applications such as emojis. Depending on the cell phone’s operating system, the user can have a range of emoticons to better express their emotions, especially during this year, when the range was expanded and added new figures of gestures such as those of forming a heart or crossed index and thumb with more of 15 different skin tones, as shared by the specialized portal Emojipedia.

La humita among the most recent WhatsApp emojis

But of all the existing emojis, which were the favorites for users this year? Find out what they are, thanks to a list made by The Unicode Consortium.

The consortium indicates that these emojis: ???? ❤️ ???? ???? ???? ???? ???? ???? ???? ???? are preferred by more than 92% of the world’s population. And surely you also use them frequently.

An emoji does not appear on the list, however, it has managed to climb in the favorites table. It is about the sad, pleading and tender face: ????, which jumped from place 97 to 14 between 2019 and 2021.

This was the beginning of emojis

And that in 1999 the first color emojis appeared, designed by Shigetaka Kurita, a Japanese interface designer, who created 176 characters inspired by Japanese culture such as manga and kanjis, to be used by a mobile internet platform.

Its 176 original emojis included hearts, cars or a snowman, but no human faces, and more than twenty years later they have become popular on social media and in emails to quickly express emotions or give directions ( a thumb up, down, raising the finger, a hand saying goodbye, a few crossed fingers, etc).

But the head of Hootsuite in Spain, Romina González, has observed that although many of these drawings are very easily understood (such as smiley faces or thumbs), there are others that are not easy to interpret and that even “translators” of emojis.

For this reason, this platform has underlined the importance of using the most popular ones, of making sure that you know the recipient of those symbols or drawings well and understand that they can be interpreted very differently depending on the region of the world.

For example, the folded hands in Japan express “please” or “thank you” but in other parts of the world many use it as a symbol of prayer. (E)