Out of over 3,000 Emojis to choose from, here are the ones we use the most

You may hate seeing an Emoji in your texts or social media feeds, but love ’em or hate ’em the little cartoon pictures are here to stay. This year, the number of available Emojis will surpass 3,000 for the very first time, almost double what we had just four years ago.

Interestingly enough, today is World Emoji Day, and we’re seeing lots of Emoji-related info pop up around the web, including the news that Google is bringing 65 new Emojis to Android Q.

Over at Statista, we got some information surrounding just how many Emoji characters there really are, and how much growth we’ve seen since the beginning. Check out the chart below:

The jump from 139 Emojis to 1,145 from 2009 to 2010 is due to Unicode finally incorporated the characters into its index. Since then, Unicode has been largely responsible for the organization of Emojis as well as helping to determine the new Emojis coming in.

But which Emojis are the most popular? A recent study from Adobe suggests that we love the Emojis that lighten the mood of conversations and show support to people. As such, these are the three most popular characters:

Remarkably, this lines up very well with studies we’ve seen focusing on popular Emojis on different social media networks. Check out that below:

You might be wondering why the recycle Emoji is so popular on Twitter but not on Instagram or Facebook. It turns out that this Emoji is used heavily by Muslim users who subscribe to bot prayer posting services. Those services use the sign to encourage people to retweet/share the post. The Emoji also works for this purpose because of its color: green has symbolic associations in the Quran and is known as one of the Pan-Arab colors together with white, red and black.

To learn more about how people use Emojis, check out Adobe’s study here.

NEXT: This free tool turns your photos into beautiful Emoji mosaics