World Emoji Day: A global celebration of smileys, records, and new digital icons.

July 17th isn't a random date: it's the day that appears on the calendar emoji on Apple devices, a date that's been there since 2002, when the iCal app was announced during the MacWorld Expo. From this curious detail, Jeremy Burge , the founder of Emojipedia , launched World Emoji Day in 2014, which today is a truly international celebration, with thousands of users, brands, and social platforms involved in various ways. According to the official website , WorldEmojiDay.com , the day is intended for fun but also to reflect on how emojis have become an essential part of global communication. Perhaps in recent years, they've aged a bit, both in terms of use (very restrained by younger generations) and abuse (by Boomers and, to some extent, Millennials), but the interesting thing is that each generation immersed in the digital world has ultimately found its own way to recode these ubiquitous pictograms according to its own sensibilities.

A viral and competitive party

World Emoji Day isn't just about online posts: every year, hashtags like #WorldEmojiDay become popular on social media, along with creative challenges, digital events, and even concerts and artistic performances related to the world of emoji. One of the most anticipated events is the World Emoji Awards , the official awards organized by Emojipedia to crown the most popular emoji of the year or the most anticipated among the sets still being approved by Unicode. It's also a time for companies and platforms to announce new emoji groups or software updates that introduce them. The Unicode Consortium is an organization that orchestrates character standardization and interoperability between devices from different manufacturers using different systems.

Emoji: Mind-boggling numbers

The importance of emojis is, of course, also measured in numbers: Emojipedia records over 45 million searches per month on the meaning of various smileys and symbols. And there's one emoji that, more than any other, has become a global symbol: the infamous Face with Tears of Joy , the face laughing out loud , which in recent years has dominated the charts as the most used emoji overall, with billions of uses and nuances ranging from hearty laughter to mockery. Even the BBC , in its special dedicated to World Emoji Day, emphasizes how these little icons are now considered a universal language, so much so that they've become an integral part of pop culture and even marketing strategies. Perhaps too much so, at times. Often irritatingly so. And with flare-ups that sometimes lead us to "go on a diet" from their frenetic use. But in any case, they're now difficult to replace.

Emojis in everyday life

But how much do we really use the 3,521 emojis available on our smartphone keyboards? According to global data cited by the BBC , over 10 billion emojis are sent every day in messages, chats, and across social networks and platforms of all kinds. They're used by people of all ages—the impression, in particular, is that their excessive use increases with age—who consider them essential for expressing emotions or clarifying the tone of a conversation, often failing to do so. And not just in personal messages: emojis are increasingly appearing in official communications, corporate posts, and we've seen them hundreds of times in advertising campaigns, demonstrating how deeply ingrained this visual language is in our daily lives.

The new entries of 2025

Every World Emoji Day is also an opportunity to discuss upcoming new emojis . This year, the most anticipated new additions are part of the Unicode 16.0 standard, approved in September 2024 but expected to become more widely used in 2025 as various manufacturers gradually release updates to their operating systems. There are eight new emojis: the tired and worn-out face, the fingerprint, a stain or brush stroke, a root vegetable, the bare tree, the harp, the shovel, and the flag of Sark, one of the Channel Islands. According to Emojipedia , the "exhausted face" is already the most popular among the new additions, followed by the stain and the shovel, symbols used in creative contexts or digital work. Apple, with iOS 18.4 released on March 31, 2025, made all eight new emojis animated.

The Return of EmojiTracker

Another new development for 2025 is the return of emojitracker.com , a site that tracks in real time how many times each emoji is used on X (formerly Twitter). After a period of offline usage, the once-popular service is back to satisfy the curiosity of those who want to know, at any given moment, which emoji is the most clicked on the planet, at least on that platform. A global mood thermometer, capable of revealing how emoji popularity changes with world events, viral trends, or simply the collective mood.

Candidates for 2025-2026

In a few weeks, on September 9th, Unicode is expected to officially approve the Emoji 17.0 version candidates, which will arrive alongside the Unicode 17.0 standard. Among the proposed new emoji are curious symbols and objects like a treasure chest , a distorted face , a trombone , an apple core , and even wrestlers . Enthusiasts can already explore the entire list of draft emoji here.

A universal (but ever-evolving) language

World Emoji Day isn't just a playful, tech-focused celebration, it's also a time to reflect on how these little icons have transformed the way we communicate. From the first Japanese smiley in the 1990s—but their history is complicated: while Shigetaka Kurita, a then 27-year-old Japanese graphic designer, is often credited with creating the first set of 176 emojis in 1999 for NTT DoCoMo's i-mode platform, we should also consider the text emoticons created by Scott Fahlman in 1982 and some other predecessors—we've arrived at a global system with thousands of symbols expressing emotions, activities, foods, sports, objects, signs, coats of arms, cultures, and even social issues. And often, as in the case of the watermelon slice for Palestine , they are used, perhaps for a colorful appeal, to convey causes and solidarity with oppressed peoples. According to experts, emojis help people express themselves more easily, especially online, where sometimes vocal tones, all or part of the body language are lacking, and people don't have time to write as much as they'd like. And if it's true that "a smiley is worth a thousand words," World Emoji Day is the perfect day to remember it, toasting—naturally—with the wine glass emoji. A classic, it's true, but it's something you can do every now and then.