Today sees the celebration of World Emoji Day 🥳. The modern take on Egyptian hieroglyphs has allowed us to infuse tone into text, allowing you to be more expressive.

This week, Mark Zuckerberg announced that WhatsApp will be expanding the number of reactions you can use. Every day, billions of people around the world use Meta’s technologies (Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) to communicate and connect with their family, friends and communities. Although these connections are not in physical form, emojis still allow you to communicate what our body language and facial expressions usually do, which words alone simply cannot capture.

All emoji lovers will be happy to know that new emojis will be rolling out later this year. In anticipation of that, here are the most popular emojis used in the last year.

Top emojis by South Africa over the past year.

Oldie but goodie

• ⚽ – South Africans love the soccer ball emoji with it being a popular choice on IG bios.
• 🧘🏽 – The Person in Lotus Position
• 🏉 – Ruby ball
• 🏋️‍♂️ – Man lifting weights
• 🏀 – Basketball
• 🎂 – Birthday cake
• 🥂 – Clinking glasses
• 🍾 – A bottle of sparkling wine with the cork popping off
• 🍰 – A slice of strawberry shortcake
• 🍻 – Clinking beer mugs

Judging from the above, we are all about sports and the good times. In addition to these top emojis that we use as South Africans, we also have favourites from the recently released emojis.

Newfound favourites 

• A yellow face with tears welling up at the bottom of its two large eyes. It May be used to express a range of emotions, including:
  • Sadness
  • Anger
  • Embarrassment
  • Admiration
  • Gratitude.
• Two hands forming a heart shape. Used to express love and support.
• The eyes and mouth slip down the face while maintaining a distorted smile. This quality lends this emoji to sarcasm. It can be used literally to talk about extreme heat or metaphorically to talk about embarrassment, shame or a slowly sinking sense of dread.
• A yellow face with its hands over its eyes and raised eyebrows. One eye is peeking through the fingers in anticipation. You can use it to express the duality of wanting to look away from something because it’s frightening, disgusting, or embarrassing, but not being able to.
• A hand with the index finger pointing straight forward at the person viewing the emoji. 

Whatever your application, be sure to add the element of emotion to your text to convey the message you are trying to get across. 

Here is to a splendid World Emoji Day 2022🥳🥂🤸🏾.