Face with Tears of Joy emoji
Face with Tears of Joy (😂) is an emoji that represents a crying with laughter facial expression. While it is broadly referred to as an emoji, since it is used to demonstrate emotion, it is also referred to as an emoticon. Since the emoji has evolved from numerous different designs pre-unicode, it has different names and meanings in different regions and cultures. It is also known as Tears of Joy emoji, lol emoji, joy emoji, laughing emoji, cry-laugh emoji, crying laughing emoji, or the laughing crying emoji. The emoji is used in communication to portray joking and teasing on messaging platforms including Apple's iMessage and Meta's WhatsApp, as well as social media websites such as Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, and Instagram. The emoji is one of the most commonly used emojis in the Emoticons Unicode block. The Oxford Dictionary recognized the emoji as its Word of the Year in 2015 due to its popular usage, and regarded it as the most popular emoji.[citation needed]
Development history
In general terms, emoji development dates back to the late 1990s in Japan. Two competing companies,
Since DoCoMo's i-Mode emoji set derived from a Japanese visual style commonly found in manga and anime, combined with kaomoji, they symbolise facial expressions.[5] Emojipedia tweeted about the set in 2019, demonstrating what emojis were available in 1997. The original 1997 version of the Softbank set was in black and white and did contain faces with emotion, but only two, one smiley and one with a sad face.[6] A colourful, often animated, face with tears of joy would appear in later versions of the Softbank set, from 2000 onwards.[7][8]
The digital smiley movement was headed up by Nicolas Loufrani, the CEO of The Smiley Company.[9] In 2001, The Smiley Company developed and launched The Smiley Dictionary. The Dictionary provided a list of emotions that could be used to communicate online.[9][10] The smiley toolbar offered a variety of symbols and smileys and was used on platforms such as MSN Messenger.[11] The Smiley Dictionary contained hundreds of yellow-faced emoticons, including a laughing emoticon. It is the oldest known laughing emoticon.[12] Nokia, one of the largest telecoms companies globally at the time, were still referring to today's emoji sets as smileys in 2001.[13]
By 2010, when the
Cultural impact of emoji
In the mid-2010s, the "Face with Tears emoji" became mainstream. In 2015,
In May 2015, Instagram posted a blog that highlighted user data, revealing that the emoji is the most used on Instagram.[21] In December 2015, Twitter tweeted that the Face with Tears of Joy emoji was the most used emoji that year, used over 6.6 billion times.[14][22]
On
Twitter users voted 😂 as the most popular emoji "of all time" in 2017, granting it the Lifetime Achievement Award in Emojipedia's annual World Emoji Awards.[27][28]
The emoji started to decline in popularity around the early 2020s, because Generation Z began to associate it with older generations, thus perceiving it as "uncool". It has been predominately replaced by the sobbing emoji (😭) and skull emoji (💀) to express similar emotions. However, CNN did note that "sometimes teens and twenty-somethings use emoji -- like the laughing crying one -- ironically, such as by sending six or seven of them in a row to friends, to exaggerate it. But, overall, that emoji is a no-go."[29] Whilst the emoji has maintained its popularity with millennials, Generation Z utilises the emoji as a form of irony. Following in the decrease in usage over Twitter, the Face with Tears of Joy emoji was briefly dethroned as the most popular Twitter emoji.[30] Researchers speculate that this decrease in popularity is due to its over-saturation and overuse within online communities.[31] In late 2021 and early 2022, however, it returned to the top of Twitter's most popular emoji.[32][33]
Reception
In November 2013, Brenden Gallagher of
Regarding the reasoning behind the emoji's popularity, Fred Benenson, author of Emoji Dick, commented that "it is versatile. It can be used to convey joy, obviously, but also 'I'm laughing so hard I'm crying.' So you've got two basic, commonly occurring human emotions covered."[14] Benenson also attributed the emoji's popularity to it being one of the better designed emojis from Apple.[14] Abi Wilkinson, a freelance journalist writing for The Guardian, opined that the Face with Tears of Joy emoji is "the worst emoji of all", describing it as an "obnoxious, chortling little yellow dickhead [with] bulbous, cartoonish tears streaming down its face".[36]
Encoding of emoji
The Face with Tears of Joy emoji is encoded as follows:
Preview | 😂 | 😹 | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
Unicode name | FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY | CAT FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY | ||
Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex |
Unicode | 128514 | U+1F602 | 128569 | U+1F639 |
UTF-8 | 240 159 152 130 | F0 9F 98 82 | 240 159 152 185 | F0 9F 98 B9 |
UTF-16 | 55357 56834 | D83D DE02 | 55357 56889 | D83D DE39 |
GB 18030 | 148 57 252 56 | 94 39 FC 38 | 149 48 132 51 | 95 30 84 33 |
Numeric character reference | 😂 |
😂 |
😹 |
😹 |
au by KDDI)[37] |
244 104 | F4 68 | 244 103 | F4 67 |
SoftBank 3G)[37] |
251 82 | FB 52 | ||
7-bit JIS (au by KDDI)[15] | 123 73 | 7B 49 | 123 72 | 7B 48 |
Emoji shortcode[38] | :joy: | :joy_cat: | ||
Google name (pre-Unicode)[39] | HAPPY FACE 5 | CAT FACE 3 | ||
CLDR text-to-speech name[40] | face with tears of joy | cat with tears of joy |
See also
- Pile of Poo emoji
- LOL
References
- ^ Alt, Matt (December 7, 2015). "Why Japan Got Over Emojis". Slate. Archived from the original on May 14, 2020. Retrieved April 24, 2020.
- ^ a b Steinmetz, Katy (November 16, 2015). "Oxford's 2015 Word of the Year Is This Emoji". Time. Archived from the original on July 25, 2017. Retrieved July 28, 2017.
- ^ a b Cocozza, Paula (November 17, 2015). "Crying with laughter: how we learned how to speak emoji". The Guardian. Archived from the original on May 6, 2019. Retrieved July 28, 2017.
- ^ McCurry, Justin (October 27, 2016). "The inventor of emoji on his famous creations – and his all-time favorite". The Guardian. Retrieved June 17, 2018.
- from the original on January 23, 2021. Retrieved 14 November 2020.
- ^ "SoftBank 1997". Emojipedia.
- ^ "Face with Tears of Joy". Emojipedia.
- ^ "New in SoftBank 2000 Emoji List". Emojipedia.
- ^ a b Speare-Cole, Rebecca (November 10, 2019). "Man behind iconic smiley face symbol says limited number of emojis restricts freedom of speech". Evening Standard.
- ^ Hutchins, Robert (March 7, 2016). "SmileyWorld's CEO Nicolas Loufrani on plagiarism, the school market and a push for more toys". Licensing.biz. Archived from the original on January 30, 2020. Retrieved March 22, 2022.
- ^ Golby, Joel (August 9, 2017). "The Man Who Owns the Smiley Face". Vice.
- ^ "A-Z of Smileys - Letter L". TheSmileyDictionary. Archived from the original on April 3, 2002.
- ^ "Nokia 3310 User guide" (PDF). Nokia.
- ^ a b c d McHugh, Molly (December 9, 2015). "Time Should've Made the Tears of Joy Emoji Person of the Year". Wired. Archived from the original on March 21, 2017. Retrieved July 28, 2017.
- ^ UTC L2/10-132. Archived(PDF) from the original on June 15, 2019.
- ^ Unicode Consortium. "Emoji Sources". Unicode Character Database.
- ^ "Apple iPhone OS 2.2". Emojipedia.
- ^ Oxford Dictionaries Blog. November 16, 2015. Archived from the originalon July 10, 2017. Retrieved July 28, 2017.
- ^ Chalabi, Mona (June 5, 2014). "The 100 Most-Used Emojis". FiveThirtyEight. Archived from the original on July 19, 2017. Retrieved July 31, 2017.
- ^ Hale-Stern, Kaila (November 16, 2015). "And Your 2015 Word of the Year Is...the Face With Tears of Joy Emoji?". Gizmodo. Archived from the original on March 12, 2017. Retrieved July 29, 2017.
- ^ Dimson, Thomas (May 1, 2015). "Emojineering Part 1: Machine Learning for Emoji Trends". Instagram Engineering. Archived from the original on February 18, 2020. Retrieved July 28, 2017.
- ^ @TwitterData (December 7, 2015). "Here are the most-used emoji on Twitter this year. 😂 comes out on top, with 6.6 billion uses. #YearOnTwitter" (Tweet). Retrieved July 28, 2017 – via Twitter.
- ^ Farokhmanesh, Megan (July 17, 2017). "Facebook's most-used emoji accurately sum up the platform: hearts and tears". The Verge. Archived from the original on July 29, 2017. Retrieved July 28, 2017.
- ^ Cohen, David (July 14, 2017). "On Any Given Day, 60 Million Emojis Are Used on Facebook; 5 Billion on Messenger". Adweek. Archived from the original on July 31, 2017. Retrieved July 31, 2017.
- ^ "Emojis honoured in world celebration". BBC. July 17, 2017. Archived from the original on July 28, 2017. Retrieved July 28, 2017.
- ^ Bruner, Raisa (July 17, 2017). "7 Emoji Facts to Help You Celebrate World Emoji Day". Time. Archived from the original on July 20, 2017. Retrieved July 31, 2017.
- ^ @EmojiAwards (July 18, 2017). "🏆 Congratulations to 😂 Face With Tears of Joy: winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award. Announced live from @NYSE for #WorldEmojiDay 2017 👏" (Tweet). Retrieved August 18, 2017 – via Twitter.
- ^ Robbins, Caryn (July 17, 2017). "Winners of World Emoji Awards to be Announced on World Emoji Day". Broadway World. Archived from the original on August 15, 2017. Retrieved August 18, 2017.
- ^ Yurieff, Kaya (February 15, 2021). "Sorry, millennials. The 😂 emoji isn't cool anymore". CNN Business. Retrieved April 7, 2021.
- ^ Broni, Keith (April 1, 2021). "😭 Loudly Crying Becomes Top Tier Emoji". Emojipedia. Retrieved August 24, 2021.
- ^ Jones, Daisy (July 2, 2021). "How the Cry-Laughing Face Became the Most Divisive Emoji in History". Vice. Retrieved August 24, 2021.
- ^ Porter, Jon (December 3, 2021). ""Face with tears of joy" is once again the most-used emoji". The Verge. Retrieved August 24, 2022.
- ^ Silva, Christianna (February 9, 2022). "Tears of joy emoji might be experiencing a renaissance". Mashable. Retrieved August 24, 2022.
- Complex. Archivedfrom the original on July 29, 2017. Retrieved July 28, 2017.
- ^ Waldman, Katy (November 16, 2015). "This Year's Word of the Year Isn't Even a Word 😂😂😂". Slate. Archived from the original on December 4, 2016. Retrieved July 29, 2017.
- ^ Wilkinson, Abi (November 24, 2016). "The 'tears of joy' emoji is the worst of all – it's used to gloat about human suffering". The Guardian. Archived from the original on June 24, 2017. Retrieved July 28, 2017.
- ^ a b Unicode Consortium. "Emoji Sources". Unicode Character Database. Archived from the original on April 28, 2020. Retrieved April 24, 2020.
- ^ JoyPixels. "Emoji Alpha Codes". Emoji Toolkit. Archived from the original on January 23, 2021. Retrieved April 24, 2020.
- from the original on October 3, 2020. Retrieved September 21, 2020.
- ^ Unicode, Inc. "Annotations". Common Locale Data Repository. Archived from the original on January 23, 2021. Retrieved September 21, 2020.
Further reading
- Bennett, Jessica (July 8, 2017). "Laugh and the World Laughs With You. Type 'Ha,' Not So Much". The New York Times. Retrieved July 28, 2017.
- Broder, Melissa (July 27, 2017). "Is Our Choice of Emoji a Window into Our Souls?". Vice. Vice Media. Retrieved July 28, 2017.
- Ziv, Stav (November 6, 2015). "Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year Is Not A Word". Newsweek. Retrieved July 28, 2017.