Appearance in 167x167px 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 An emoticon (, , rarely , ), short for "emotion icon", also known simply as an emote, is a pictorial representation of a facial expression using characters—usually punctuation marks, numbers, and letters—to express a person's feelings, ...

. 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 and

social media Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social medi ...

websites such as

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...

, Snapchat,

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

and Instagram. The emoji is one of the most commonly used emojis in the Emoticons Unicode block. ''The Oxford Dictionary'' recognised the emoji as its Word of the Year in 2015 due to its common usage.

Development history

In general terms, emoji development dates back to the late 1990s in Japan. Two competing companies, NTT DoCoMo and

Softbank is a Japanese multinational conglomerate holding company headquartered in Minato, Tokyo which focuses on investment management. The Group primarily invests in companies operating in technology, energy, and financial sectors. It also runs the Vi ...

created the first two emoji sets. Softbank's J-Phone launched in 1997, but due to the limited adoption of the product, it was not popular. The first popular set was designed by NTT DoCoMo employee

Shigetaka Kurita (born May 9, 1972, Gifu Prefecture, Japan) is a Japanese interface designer and often cited for his early work with emoji sets. Many refer to him as the creator of the emoji, a claim clarified in recent years. He was part of the team that cr ...

in 1999, after he sketched illustrations to be used in text messages. Kurita's set contained colored images, but none of the 176 emojis represented emotions. Despite the media referring to Kurita as the father of the emoji, the Tears of Joy emoji cannot be traced back to his early work. Since DoCoMo's i-Mode emoji set derived from a Japanese visual style commonly found in manga and

anime is hand-drawn and computer-generated animation originating from Japan. Outside of Japan and in English, ''anime'' refers specifically to animation produced in Japan. However, in Japan and in Japanese, (a term derived from a shortening of ...

, combined with ''

kaomoji An emoticon (, , rarely , ), short for "emotion icon", also known simply as an emote, is a pictorial representation of a facial expression using Character (symbol), characters—usually punctuation marks, numbers, and letters—to express a ...

'', they symbolise facial expressions. Emojipedia tweeted about the set in 2019, demonstrating what emojis were available in 1997. The Softbank set did contain faces with emotion, but only two, one smiley and one with a sad face. The emoji set was in black and white. The digital smiley movement was headed up by Nicolas Loufrani, the CEO of The Smiley Company. 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. The smiley toolbar offered a variety of symbols and smileys and was used on platforms such as

MSN Messenger MSN Messenger (also known colloquially simply as "Messenger"), later rebranded as Windows Live Messenger, was a cross-platform instant-messaging client developed by Microsoft. It connected to the Microsoft Messenger service and, in later versio ...

. The Smiley Dictionary contained hundreds of yellow-faced emoticons, including a laughing emoticon. It is the oldest known laughing emoticon.

Nokia Nokia Corporation (natively Nokia Oyj, referred to as Nokia) is a Finnish multinational telecommunications, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, established in 1865. Nokia's main headquarters are in Espoo, Finland, i ...

, one of the largest telecoms companies globally at the time, were still referring to today's emoji sets as

smiley A smiley, sometimes referred to as a smiley face, is a basic ideogram that represents a smiling face. Since the 1950s it has become part of popular culture worldwide, used either as a standalone ideogram, or as a form of communication, such a ...

s in 2001. The

Unicode Consortium The Unicode Consortium (legally Unicode, Inc.) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization incorporated and based in Mountain View, California. Its primary purpose is to maintain and publish the Unicode Standard which was developed with the intentio ...

's 6.0 emoji set release was the birth of many official emojis used today, including the "Face with Tears of Joy" emoji. was introduced with the October 2010 release of

Unicode 6.0 Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, whic ...

. Unicode released the set in 2010, but

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancestor, ' ...

first developed its emoji keyboard for the Japanese market and released it on their first iPhone in 2007. The Tears of Joy emoji was released worldwide in 2011, following an

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also include ...

update. This along with other providers and online platforms taking similar routes with adoption of emoji keyboards, meant a boom in usage of emojis.

Cultural impact of emoji

Appearance on Twitter, Twemoji, used on

, Discord (software), Discord, Roblox, the Nintendo Switch, and more, 167x167px In the mid-2010s, the "Face with Tears emoji" became mainstream. In 2015, ''FiveThirtyEight'' noted that 😂 was the second most used emoji on Twitter, appearing in 278 million tweets, only behind the "Hearts" emoji (♥️), which appeared in 342 million. That same year,

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...

, along with SwiftKey explored the frequency and usage statistics for global emoji usage. They found that 😂 was globally the most used emoji that year, and was chosen as

Oxford Dictionaries Oxford dictionary may refer to any dictionary published by Oxford University Press, particularly: Historical dictionaries * ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') * ''Shorter Oxford English Dictionary'', abridgement of the ''OED'' Single-volume d ...

Word of the Year The word(s) of the year, sometimes capitalized as "Word(s) of the Year" and abbreviated "WOTY" (or "WotY"), refers to any of various assessments as to the most important word(s) or expression(s) in the public sphere The public sphere (german: Ö ...

for such, stating the emoji "was chosen as the 'word' that best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015." SwiftKey further detailed that the emoji made up 20% of all emojis used in the UK in 2015, and 17% of those in the US, up from 4% and 9% respectively, from 2014.

president Caspar Grathwohl explained Oxford's choice, stating, "emoji are becoming an increasingly rich form of communication, one that transcends linguistic borders." In May 2015, Instagram posted a blog that highlighted user data, revealing that the emoji is the most used on Instagram. In December 2015,

tweeted that the Face with Tears of Joy emoji was the most used emoji that year, used over 6.6 billion times. On World Emoji Day 2017,

founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared the ten most used emojis on the Facebook platform; the Face with Tears of Joy emoji ranked #1 globally and in the UK, while also being one of the top three most used globally on the Messenger app. Additionally, SwiftKey announced that the emoji was the most used in the United Kingdom during 2016. In 2017, ''

Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, ...

'' reported that for the third consecutive year the emoji " eignedsupreme on social media".

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''. 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 The skull is a bone protective cavity for the brain. The skull is composed of four types of bone i.e., cranial bones, facial bones, ear ossicles and hyoid bone. However two parts are more prominent: the cranium and the mandible. In humans, th ...

emoji (💀) to express similar emotions. However,

CNN CNN (Cable News Network) is a multinational cable news channel headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. Founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable news channel, and presently owned by ...

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." 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. Researchers speculate that this decrease in popularity is due to its over-saturation and overuse within online communities. In late 2021 and early 2022, however, it returned to the top of Twitter's most popular emoji.

Reception

In November 2013, Brenden Gallagher of ''

Complex Complex commonly refers to: * Complexity, the behaviour of a system whose components interact in multiple ways so possible interactions are difficult to describe ** Complex system, a system composed of many components which may interact with each ...

'' ranked the "Laughing Crying Face" emoji at #2 in his "Emoji Power Rankings", writing that "research courtesy of Complex Stats and Information indicates that the Laughing Crying Face has almost reached a point of complete saturation". In response to Oxford's choice to make "😂" their word of the year in 2015, '' Slate'' staff writer Katy Waldman commented that "😂 sthe right linguistic incarnation of yet another complicated year, not to mention a good commentary on the very act of choosing a word of the year. What does it mean? Is it good or bad? It depends! With he emoji'sintense and inscrutable emotional

lability Lability refers to something that is constantly undergoing change or is likely to undergo change. Biochemistry In reference to biochemistry, this is an important concept as far as kinetics is concerned in metalloproteins. This can allow for th ...

, tis less of a word and more of an invitation to invent some sort of meaning". 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." Benenson also attributed the emoji's popularity to it being one of the better designed emojis from

. Abi Wilkinson, a freelance journalist writing for ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'', opined that the Face with Tears of Joy emoji is "the worst emoji of all", describing it as an "obnoxious, chortling little yellow dickhead

ith The Ith () is a ridge in Germany's Central Uplands which is up to 439 m high. It lies about 40 km southwest of Hanover and, at 22 kilometres, is the longest line of crags in North Germany. Geography Location The Ith is immediatel ...

bulbous, cartoonish tears streaming down its face".

Encoding of emoji

The Face with Tears of Joy emoji is encoded as follows:

References

External links

Face with Tears of Joy
at Emojipedia {{Portal bar, Internet 2010s in Internet culture 2020s in Internet culture Computer-related introductions in 2010 Emoji Crying Laughter Symbols introduced in 2010