Post #3955438

2026-07-17 16:13 UTC

"what are the two readings of 🙃?" - Roughly, one group sees this emoji as a whimsical, funny alternative to the "regular" smiley 🙂 , which they also read as positive ("happy, smiling"). The other group sees it as sarcastic, passive-aggressive, or uncomfortable. There are many nuances but those are the two groups. #emojis #WorldEmojiDay #linguistics

Replies (1)

@tschfflr@fediscience.org 2026-07-17 16:19

"which emojis are used the least often?" - Great question, and we rarely find data on this! But luckily, we studied this at least for two corpora with German users (and admittedly only for face emojis). So: Many object or symbol emojis (from the "tail end" of the emoji list) are very, very rarely used. Overall, faces and hearts are the most frequent. Among the face emojis, we compiled the full list of usages from a huge Twitter corpus (semi-public communication, 2014-2022) and a much small WhatsApp chat corpus (private or group communication). You can find the frequencies in this table linked below (and sort by frequency by clicking on the column). The least frequent face emoji in the large corpus was the "frowning face with open mouth" 😦, which most people have never seen before. Personally, I think it's pretty ambiguous and not very useful, as there are better emojis for anything it might express. #emojis #linguistics #WorldEmojiDay https://tscheffler.github.io/2024-Face-Emoji-Norming/ratings.html

Open ##3955436