Today, July 17th is the World Emoji Day, a day dedicated to these funny emoticons that we all use to express our mood via chat and on our social media. The initiative started in 2014 thanks to an idea by Jeremy Burge, founder of Emojipedia, the website that catalogue all the emojis available. During the lockdown, there were some new additions like the one created by Twitter to encourage people to frequently wash their hands and the one created by Facebook featuring two people while they’re hugging. The pandemic impacted even this sector: the new upcoming emojis, scheduled for this fall will stay the same, but the ones that were supposed to be released in 2021 will be postponed until 2022. The news was confirmed by Unicode last week.
Among the 117 new symbols, there is even a homage to Italy: the iconic hand gesture that they’re famous for. The catalogue will soon include the transgender flag, a woman wearing a suit and a gender-neutral Santa Clause. The emojis are becoming more and more inclusive for each update.
What are the most used emojis? Unicode revealed, last year in occasion of the World Emoji Day, that at the first place there is the laughing/crying face, followed by the heart, the heart-shaped eyes face, the blushing face and the “thank god” hands.
