Ring a bell? Dubliner unveils emoji of the year at New York Stock Exchange

Emojipedia editor in chief Keith Broni marked its 10th anniversary by attending the opening of the New York Stock Exchange with phone customisation platform Zedge. 

The pink love heart is the most popular new emoji of 2023 while the current year is best summed up by the “melting face” emoji, according to the World Emoji Awards.

The World Emoji Awards is held annually on July 17, with social media users voting on the most popular new emoji, the emoji that best sums up the current year, and the emoji update they are most looking forward to.

The pink heart emoji was voted best new arrival: the rest of the top five most popular were the Shaking Face, the Light Blue Heart, the Grey Heart, and the Wing. 

“Hearts are some of the most popular emojis and that’s because most of the emojis people use are expressions of positive emotion,” Dubliner Keith Broni, editor in chief of online emoji dictionary Emojipedia, said.

Social media users chose a pink love heart more than any other emoji this year — but they've decided the symbol that best sums up 2023 is the melting face emoji. Picture: World Emoji Awards 

“People use them to create a sense of rapport and to add a clear semantic marker to their text messages.”

Mr Broni said several new shades of heart were released in 2022, but that the pink version was the clear winner. He said: 

It’s a little less overtly romantic than the classic red heart, so people are using it to talk about a level of contentment or affection, often on a platform that’s very visual like Instagram or Tiktok.

Emojis can be traced back to pagers in Japan in the 1990s and are now updated annually.

Emojipedia, the website founded by Australian Jeremy Burge and now fronted by Mr Broni, celebrates its 10th anniversary this year.

In honour of the occasion and to mark World Emoji Day, Zedge, the mobile phone customisation platform that owns Emojipedia, was invited to open the New York Stock Exchange with the traditional bell-ringing ceremony.

“It’s very exciting and surreal to be invited to New York for the opening of the day’s trading,” Mr Broni said.

From simple graphics used in pagers in Japan in the 1990s, emojis including the classic smiley, are now often presented as sophisticated 3D animations. File picture: iStock

While voters opted for hearts for their favourite newcomers, the emoji voted as most accurately summing up 2023 was one that may suggest a little more social malaise: the “melting face” emoji.

The next emoji update, Emoji 15.1, will be released in September 2023. Among the anticipated additions to the emoji lexicon are a phoenix, a lime, and two shaking heads.

It’s a little less overtly romantic than the classic red heart, so people are using it to talk about a level of contentment or affection, often on a platform that’s very visual like Instagram or Tiktok.