2019 will see the release of 230 new emojis including the waffle, the sloth and the wheelchair, growing the number of the popular pictograms to 3,019. What emojis appear on people’s phones and on their social media platforms is not arbitrary but has been coordinated by the Unicode Consortium since 1995, when the first 76 pictograms were adapted by U.S. nonprofit. The Consortium has been overseeing the character inventory of electronic text processing since 1991 and sets a standard for symbols, characters in different scripts and – last but not least – emojis, which are encoded uniformly across different platforms even though styles may vary between providers.

Today it is estimated that more than 700 million emojis are used every day in Facebook posts alone, with New Year’s eve being the most popular day to use them, according to the social network. The most popular emoji on Facebook, as well as on Twitter, is the “laughing face with tears of joy”, as it is officially called. The heart reigns supreme on Instagram and Twitter’s surprising emoji comes in third.

source statista