Face with Tears of Joy (😂) is an

emoji An emoji ( ; plural emoji or emojis; , ) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram, or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of modern emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from type ...

depicting a face crying with laughter. It is part of the Emoticons block of

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

, and was added to the Unicode Standard in 2010 in Unicode 6.0, the first Unicode release intended to release emoji characters. One of the most popular emojis, Face with Tears of Joy was chosen as the Word of the Year by

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'', an abridgement of the ''OED'' Single-volu ...

in 2015. It is used to express joy and the feeling of intense laughter.

Development history

In general terms, emoji development dates back to the late 1990s in Japan. By 2010, when the

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

was compiling a unified collection of characters from the Japanese cellular emoji sets, which would be included with the release of Unicode 6.0, a face with tears of joy was included in the au by KDDI and SoftBank Mobile emoji sets. Unicode released the set in 2010, but

Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...

first developed its emoji keyboard for the Japanese market and released it in Japan in 2008 on iPhone OS 2.2, initially using the Softbank

Private Use Area In Unicode, a Private Use Area (PUA) is a range of code points that, by definition, will not be assigned characters by the standard. Three Private Use Areas are defined: one in the Basic Multilingual Plane (), and one each in, and nearly covering ...

scheme prior to standard Unicode codepoints being assigned. The Tears of Joy emoji was released on Apple devices worldwide in 2011, following an

iOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

update.

Popularity

Following the emoji's 2011 release on iOS, as well as other providers and online platforms similarly adopting emoji keyboards, there was a general

usage boom. In the mid-2010s, the "Face with Tears emoji" in particular became mainstream; by 2013, a piece in ''

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 ...

'' described the emoji's use as almost at "complete saturation". In 2014, ''

FiveThirtyEight ''FiveThirtyEight'', also rendered as ''538'', was an American website that focused on opinion poll analysis, politics, economics, and sports blogging in the United States. The website, which took its name from the number of electors in the U ...

'' noted that Face with Tears of Joy was the second most used emoji on Twitter, appearing in 278 million tweets, only behind the "Hearts" emoji (♥️), which appeared in 342 million. The next year,

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the publishing house of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world. Its first book was printed in Oxford in 1478, with the Press officially granted the legal right to print books ...

and SwiftKey found that Face with Tears of Joy was globally the most used emoji of the year. As such, it was chosen as

' Word of the Year, with the dictionary stating the emoji was the

morpheme A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this ...

that "best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015." Their research had found the emoji made up 20% of all emojis used in the UK, and 17% of those in the US, up from 4% and 9% respectively from 2014. Oxford Dictionaries president Caspar Grathwohl explained Oxford's choice, stating, "emoji are becoming an increasingly rich form of communication, one that transcends linguistic borders", further explaining that they chose Face with Tears of Joy for the way it embodied the "playfulness and intimacy" of emojis, which had become mainstream that year. During 2015,

Instagram Instagram is an American photo sharing, photo and Short-form content, short-form video sharing social networking service owned by Meta Platforms. It allows users to upload media that can be edited with Social media camera filter, filters, be ...

and

Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

released data showing the emoji was the most popular on their platforms, being used over 6.6 billion times on the latter. In 2017, the Face with Tears of Joy emoji was the most used emoji globally and in the UK on

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

, and one of the top three most used globally on the

Messenger Messenger, Messengers, The Messenger or The Messengers may refer to: People * Courier, a person or company that delivers messages, packages, or mail * Messenger (surname) * Bicycle messenger, a bicyclist who transports packages through cities * M ...

app. Additionally, SwiftKey announced that the emoji was the most used in the United Kingdom during 2016. In 2017, ''

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

'' reported that for the third consecutive year the emoji was the most popular on social media. The emoji started to decline in popularity around the early 2020s as Generation Z began to associate it with older generations, perceiving it as "uncool". It was largely replaced by the sobbing emoji (😭) and skull emoji (💀) to express similar emotions among people in their mid-20s and younger; when they did use it, they did so ironically, sending it in repetition for exaggeration. The emoji continued to be used sincerely by

millennials Millennials, also known as Generation Y or Gen Y, are the demographic cohort following Generation X and preceding Generation Z. Researchers and popular media use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000s a ...

. As it decreased in use, in 2021 it briefly stopped being the most popular Twitter emoji.

Analysis

Responding to "😂" becoming Oxford's 2015 word of the year for ''

Slate Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous, metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade, regional metamorphism. It is the finest-grained foliated metamorphic ro ...

,'' Katy Waldman wrote that the emoji was "less of a word" and more an opportunity for people to insert their own meanings, citing the emoji's "intense and inscrutable emotional

lability Lability refers to the degree that something is likely to undergo change. It is the opposite ( antonym) of stability. Biochemistry In reference to biochemistry, this is an important concept as far as kinetics is concerned in metalloprotein ...

". Fred Benenson, author of '' Emoji Dick'', has given various reasons for the emoji's popularity, including its ability to convey joy and the emotion of "I'm laughing so hard I'm crying", both "basic, common" emotions and for its representation being better designed than many other

emojis. Abi Wilkinson, writing for ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...

'', opined that the Face with Tears of Joy emoji is "the worst emoji of all", describing it as "obnoxious" and "chortling". Ilaria Moschini, writing for the journal ''Hermes'', says that the drops of water in the emoji can be read as consistent with a broader visual tradition popular in

manga are comics or graphic novels originating from Japan. Most manga conform to a style developed in Japan in the late 19th century, and the form has a long history in earlier Japanese art. The term is used in Japan to refer to both comics ...

: the water drop. These are representations of a large water drop which gain different meanings when placed on different parts of the face, including to represent physiological and inner states. She writes that in creating "😂", this element of Japanese visual tradition was synthesized with the American cultural tradition of smile face pins.

Encoding

References

External links

Face with Tears of Joy
at

Emojipedia Emojipedia is an emoji reference website which documents the meaning and common usage of emoji characters in the Unicode Standard. Most commonly described as an emoji encyclopedia or emoji dictionary, Emojipedia also publishes articles and prov ...

{{Portal bar, Internet 2010s in Internet culture 2020s in Internet culture Computer-related introductions in 2010 Crying Individual emoji Laughter Symbols introduced in 2010 Millennials Generation Z