Entertainment

Here are the world's most popular emojis

Here are the world's most popular emojis
Here are the world's most popular emojis Here are the world's most popular emojis

An emoji paints a thousand words and a new study has just shown which ones we use the most.

The huge research project from the University of Michigan looked at 427 million messages sent by nearly four million people in 212 countries.

And the most popular emoji worldwide is… the laugh crying face!

(aleepiskin/Thinkstock)

Also known as ‘face with tears of joy’ – it accounted for 15% of smileys seen in the study. The infamous emoji was also crowned word of the year by the Oxford Dictionary in 2015.

The heart and heart-eyes face came in at a not very close second and third, and both had a 6% share of total emoji use.Researchers found that nearly 20% of messages contain an emoji and different countries prefer different symbols. Countries like France, Australia and the Czech Republic tend to use more positive emojis.The French favour emojis with hearts with nearly all of their top 10 being heart-related.

The study’s lead author Wei Ai, from the University of Michigan School of Information, said: “Emojis are everywhere. They are becoming the ubiquitous language that bridges everyone across different cultures.”So perhaps the overall popularity of more positive emojis mean, in general, the world’s pretty cheery after all.