How do you determine which emojis are most popular each year?

The rise of messaging clients has meant that emojis have become a form of communication on their own, since, currently, the vast majority of users of WhatsApp, Telegram and X, the former Twitter, use emoticons to convey their feelings of joy, sadness or surprise and some of them even communicate only with emojis.

Surely, you already know that Emojipedia, the largest repository of emojis in the world, annually compiles a list of the most used emoticons of the year, but what you may not know is how they do it and, for that reason, today we come to tell you how Emojipedia determines which are the most popular emojis of each year.

This is how Emojipedia “picks” the most popular emoticons of the year

First of all, you should know that Emojipedia is a website created by the Australian developer living in London Jeremy Burge in 2013 that contains the information of all the emojis available today. As of today, this repository contains a total of 3664 emojis, but, obviously, every year this number increases with the inclusion of new emoticons.

This means that Emojipedia is the great reference in the world of emojis, since, in addition to collecting information on all the emoticons in the world, it also produces an annual ranking with the most used emojis each year.

In this blog post of the Emojipedia, Burge explains that to determine which are the most used emojis in the world, what he does is take representative samples of about 10,000 posts of X (the tweets of a lifetime) and check which are the most repeated emoticons.

Thus, for example, the most popular emoticon in 2023 was the face with tears of joy because it appeared in one out of every 161 X posts, which means that, out of every 10,000 posts, 62 of them contained a version of this emoticon.

Surely now you are wondering what were the most popular emojis of last year, so so that you are not left with doubt, here is the list of the 10 most used emoticons in 2023 prepared by Emojipedia:

1. 😂Face crying with laughter
2. 🤣Face rolling on the floor and laughing
3. ❤Red Heart
4. 🙏Hands clasped
5. 😭Face crying loudly
6. 😍Smiling face with heart eyes
7. ✨Flashes
8. 🔥Fire
9. 😊Smiling face with closed eyes
10. 🥰Smiling face with hearts

Finally, if you’ve ever wondered what an emoji means before sending it on WhatsApp, we recommend you take a look at our complete guide to the meaning of all WhatsApp emojis.

Related: What is the origin and history of the Unicode standard?