To some, they are cool and hip. To some, they are a way of expression. To some they are puerile. And to some, they are a decline of language. Love it or loathe it, but you definitely cannot ignore it. They are everywhere. They are emojis!

Emojis have become so important that there is a dedicated day to mark their birth. Today, July 17, is World Emoji Day. It is on this very day when the founder of Emojipedia, a sort of Wikipedia for emojis, Jeremy Burge created it. He picked the day from the iPhone emoji for the calendar (it shows July 17).

Emojis come a long way from 1995 when people used pagers instead of smartphones. At the time, NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s biggest cellular phone operator, added a small heart icon to its pagers. The heart was a rage among Japanese teenagers as they found that they can express an emotion that was almost impossible to portray in small snippets of text.

Emoji term comes from Japanese- e for a picture and moji for character or letter. Coincidentally, the term came across similar to emoticon and thus immense recall value and thus gained worldwide rage in a short time.

On the occasion of World Emoji Day, here are some emoji fun facts for you:

• Laughing face with tears is the most used emoji on Twitter in India, followed by the smiling face with heart eyes emoji and folded hands emoji.
• Folded hands emoji is used in everything from prayer to thank you and is perhaps the most misunderstood emoji.
• Folded hands emoji is one of the top 5 emojis used in India but has insignificant presence globally.
• On Facebook, people are fans of the red heart emoji. It is being twice as it was used last year.
• On average, more than 60-billion emojis are sent on Facebook every day.
• The biggest day for emoji usage on Messenger is New Year’s Eve.
• 2015 Oxford Dictionaries named laughing face with tears as the as word of the year.
• Herman Melville classic Moby Dick has been completely translated into emoji.
• As of June 2018, there are whopping 2823 emoji in the Unicode Standard.
• Around 86 percent of emoji users on Twitter are 24 and younger, while 57 percent of emoji users on Twitter are female.

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