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People across the world are celebrating World Emoji Day today by sharing their favorite digital symbols on social media, voting for the year's top new emoji, and participating in discussions honoring the global visual language.
From the classic heart and thumbs-up to the ubiquitous crying-laughing face, emojis have evolved into one of the world's most widely understood forms of digital expression.
Technology companies, brands, and online platforms traditionally leverage the occasion to launch themed campaigns or preview new additions to digital keyboards.
This year's celebration coincides with the final stages of the FIFA World Cup, prompting WhatsApp to temporarily redesign its soccer ball emoji through a partnership with Adidas.
World Emoji Day is celebrated on July 17 because Apple’s calendar emoji originally displayed that date, marking the 2002 launch of the company’s iCal application. Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge later adopted the date when establishing the annual celebration in 2014.
Since then, the once-niche observance has grown into an international event embraced by tech companies, social media users, and the Unicode Consortium—the nonprofit organization that standardizes emojis across digital platforms.
The history of emojis began even earlier. In 1999, Japanese designer Shigetaka Kurita created the first widely recognized emoji set for NTT Docomo's i-mode, a popular early mobile internet platform. His collection of 176 simple, 12x12-pixel icons drew inspiration from weather symbols, street signs, and manga.
Earlier text-based emoticons, such as computer scientist Scott Fahlman’s 1982 ":-)" smiley face, had already laid the groundwork for online emotional expression. Google later proposed integrating emojis into the Unicode Standard in 2007 to ensure cross-platform consistency, while Apple’s 2011 introduction of a built-in emoji keyboard helped popularize them globally.
Today, the Unicode Standard contains more than 3,950 emojis, with new designs approved annually. Emojis have also firmly cemented themselves in popular culture. For instance, Sony Pictures' 2017 animated film "The Emoji Movie," which followed a multi-expression emoji named Gene, was panned by critics but still managed to gross over $217 million worldwide.
Billions of emojis are sent every day, making them one of the world's most common forms of digital communication. The word "emoji" comes from Japanese, combining "e" (picture) and "moji" (character), although it is unrelated to the English word "emotion."
Ahead of this year's celebration, Emojipedia named Distorted Face the Most Popular New Emoji of 2026. Despite hundreds of new additions over the years, familiar faces continue to dominate global conversations. The Face with Tears of Joy remains the world's most-used emoji, followed by the Loudly Crying Face and the Red Heart.
Emojis have also drawn sustained criticism over race, culture, and politics. Early emoji sets were overwhelmingly light-skinned by default, and researchers have argued the Unicode Consortium's original "monotone" design simply failed to reckon with how political a picture can be. Apple and Unicode introduced skin-tone modifiers in 2015 to address that gap.
The weaponization of emojis for racism, xenophobia, and hate speech remains an unresolved dark side of the medium. Because automated content moderation algorithms are primarily built to detect text, abusive users routinely exploit emojis as loopholes to bypass digital safety filters.
The intersection of digital communication and the law has also sparked new legal questions. A May analysis in the Transatlantic Law Journal, titled "A Thumbs Up for Emojis in Contracting and Legal Communication," documented a growing number of lawsuits requiring courts to interpret the symbols.
Judges are increasingly being asked to determine whether a single emoji can constitute a legally binding electronic signature, signal contractual acceptance, or amount to harassment.
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