This year's World Emoji Day, celebrated this week, saw the syringe emoji winning the award for the 'Most 2021' emoji, narrowly beating the microbe emoji among voters on Twitter.

World Emoji Day is July 17 because that's the date shown on the calendar emoji, and the team at Emojipedia held their annual competition to choose not just the Most 2021 winner, but also the Most Popular New Emoji, and the Most Anticipated Emoji.

The syringe was the winner among Twitter users, who came up with a list of potential candidates including a mask wearer and a rocket. The vote then took place during early July on Twitter, with over 5,000 people voting.

The choice for most popular new emoji was calculated by analysis of the most used emoji from those introduced to major platforms in the past year, as measured by Twitter use in July 2021. The overall winner was the heart on fire emoji, with the runner up position going to the 'face with spiral eyes' emoji. Quite what that says about this year and Twitter users we're not sure.

The next competition was for most anticipated emoji. This contest was determined by popular vote, with over 15,000 emoji users voting for their favorite amongst all the draft emojis currently shortlisted for release. The winner in this category was the melting face, with 13.7% of the vote. Runners up were the face with peeking eye (10.2% of the vote), and saluting face with 9% of the vote.

The final competition for World Emoji Day is the lifetime achievement award (very Oscar-like). This is given to the most used of all emoji, old or new. Summing up 2021 very clearly, the winner was the loudly crying face, with runners up of the face with tears of joy and the pleading face. Showing there are still some things to feel amused about, the rolling on the floor laughing face came in at number four.

In the same week as World Emoji Day, the Unicode Consortium announced its recommendations for new emojis for Unicode 14. The list of 38 new emojis should have been announced back in January, but has slipped due to the global pandemic. Among the new additions are a pregnant man (added to cater for pregnant transgender and non-binary people); a troll and a gender-neutral 'person with crown'.

Most useful of the new options will probably be the low battery emoji. Here at i-programmer, we seldom encounter anyone with a crown, but low batteries are, sadly, far too frequent. 

More Information

Unicode Consortium

World Emoji Day Website

Related Articles

New Emojis Announced For World Emoji Day

Unicode 12 Adds Four New Scripts

Emojis 12 Adds An Orangutang

New Emojis For 2018

Unicode 10 Adds Bitcoin and Two Dinosaurs

Emojis 2016 - Unicode's Most Bizarre Yet?

Do We Need More Emojis?

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info