Apple Says ‘Face With Tears of Joy’ is Most Popular Emoji in United States Among English Speakers
Apple has revealed that “face with tears of joy” is the most popular emoji among English speakers in the United States. — The face topped Apple's list of the top 10 emoji, ahead of a red heart …
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's ranking lands on a well-trodden beat: the same face was named Oxford Dictionaries' 2015 Word of the Year, and SwiftKey had already mapped its regional dominance across the US in its state-by-state emoji survey. What Apple adds is first-party confirmation from its own keyboards that the face still leads among English speakers in the United States.
The claim also matches independent measurement: Adobe's 2022 survey of 5,000 US emoji users found the same face on top, with 91% saying emoji makes communication easier. Two years later, Rolling Stone crowned the saluting face — the laid-off Twitter employees' sign-off — as the emblem of 2022, showing how quickly the cultural favorite can rotate even as the all-time leader holds.
First-order effects
- Apple now has proprietary usage data on which faces its English-speaking US users actually send, giving it an evidence base for prioritizing which of the roughly 60 new designs it previews with Google each World Emoji Day get rendering attention in iOS updates like the 100+ emoji release in iOS 14.2.
Second-order effects
- Rival keyboard makers and platform vendors are pushed to keep their own popularity datasets current — SwiftKey's regional mapping set the template — because whoever can cite usage numbers shapes which emoji get design investment and marketing focus.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, emoji rankings become a recurring annual cultural metric alongside year-end 'word of the year' choices, with platform holders like Apple and Google effectively acting as the census-takers of digital expression.
The trend: Emoji popularity is consolidating into an annually reported cultural index, with platform owners' first-party usage data — and one laughing-crying face's long reign at the top — setting the reference point.