These are the ten most popular emoji, including 'tears of joy' and 'red heart'

(Image credit: Pixabay)

What you need to know

The Unicode Consortium is the body responsible for maintaining the standards for encoding text and symbols (such as emojis).
The list ranks emoji based on how frequently they're used.
Frequency of use is one of the key factors that determine if an emoji will be added to the Unicode Standard.

The Unicode Consortium this week released its list of the most frequenly used emoji. The body is responsible for maintaining the Unicode Standard, an industry-wide consensus for the digital encoding and representation of text, symbols and (in recent years) emojis. This is the first time the organization has released its internal data on the usage of various emoji, a statistic that it claims weights heavily in its decisions to accept new emoji into the standard.

Source: Unicode Consortium (Image credit: Source: Unicode Consortium)

The 'tears of joy' emoji and the 'red heart' emoji are the two most popular of the bunch, with each accounting for nearly 10% and 7% of overall emoji use, respectively. That's an impressive number, given that nearly a billion emojis are sent everyday on Facebook alone.

The complete list of the top ten most popular emoji, with variations between skin tones, gender and so on amalgamated into one, is shown below: