We can all admit that a lot has been happening this year. in fact, it could be too much to even describe in words. Thank goodness we now have emojis that can express how we feel about the bizarre year.

Today is the World Emoji Day and it would seem reasonable to check out some stats about the emojis that have been gaining and losing popularity in 2020.

A report from a reliable source of emoji knowledge, Emojipedia, shows some unexpected emojis have been used a lot since the beginning of this year. However, you should know that emoji usage has been noticed to slow down in the last few months.

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Twitter did release a list of the most used emojis by April 2020. Interestingly, the top three represent a pretty good narrative of how everyone felt during the early days of the pandemic. Oh, how innocent we were.

1. ?- Tears of Joy
2. ? Loudly Crying Face
3. ? Pleading Face
4. ? Rolling on the Floor Laughing
5. ❤️ Red Heart
6. ✨ Sparkles
7. ? Smiling Face with Heart-Eyes
8. ? Folded Hands
9. ? Smiling Face with Smiling Eyes
10. ? Smiling Face with Hearts
11. ? Thumbs Up
12. ? Two Hearts
13. ? Thinking Face

From the list, you can see that most of them express positive feelings which is surprising especially at these times.

According to Emojipedia, not much has changed though as the smileys and people (??)emojis still dominate across all sites.

COVID-19

In the same way that any major historical events influence how we communicate, the COVID-19 pandemic did see the rise in usage of certain emojis that weren’t as common before. The “Face with medical mask” rose to popularity the fastest. ???

Others that became popular include Nauseated Face ?, Face Vomiting ?, Sneezing Face ?, and Face with a Thermometer ?.

However, emojis in the Travels & Places ✈️ saw the biggest decline. This could be heavily attributed to the travel restrictions all over the world.

Emojis most commonly included in tweets containing “Coronavirus”, “COVID-19” or “COVID19”. Image courtesy Emojipedia.

Of course, there are still plenty of sites that haven’t revealed the stats when it comes to emoji usage that we would like to have seen. What is clear though is that emojis are still a major factor in modern communication. Facebook Messenger, for example, gets 5 billion emojis used every day.

And yes, they are very much aware that the peach emoji ? is not used to talk about fruit.