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Here's a List of Popular Emoji and How to Decipher Them

If someone sends you a peach or eggplant emoji, they aren't necessarily talking about food.

Headshot of Zachary McAuliffe
Headshot of Zachary McAuliffe
Zachary McAuliffe Staff writer
Zach began writing for CNET in November, 2021 after writing for a broadcast news station in his hometown, Cincinnati, for five years. You can usually find him reading and drinking coffee or watching a TV series with his wife and their dog.
Expertise Web hosting | Operating systems | Applications | Software Credentials
  • Apple software beta tester, "Helps make our computers and phones work!" - Zach's grandparents
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Headshot of Shelby Brown
Shelby Brown Editor II
Shelby Brown (she/her/hers) is an editor for CNET's services team. She covers tips and tricks for apps, operating systems and devices, as well as mobile gaming and Apple Arcade news. Shelby also oversees Tech Tips coverage. Before joining CNET, she covered app news for Download.com and served as a freelancer for Louisville.com.
Credentials
  • She received the Renau Writing Scholarship in 2016 from the University of Louisville's communication department.
Zachary McAuliffe
Shelby Brown
5 min read
THe laughing crying emoji, skull face, chair, tram, cryling loudly, broken heart, rose and dead battery emoji.
Emojipedia

If you're an emoji fan, this is probably one of the best times of year. For iPhone owners, iOS 26.4 brought your device eight new emoji, including a "🫪" distorted face and an "🫍" orca. (Note: The new emoji may not display correctly for Apple users whose devices aren't on a 26.4 software version.) While emoji can be fun, deciphering them can be challenging at times.

Over time, emoji meanings have become subjective, depending on the context of a message and wider cultural trends. A "😃" or "❤️" are easy to understand, but what's the difference between "😩" and "😭", and what does it mean when someone sends you food emoji like "🍆" or "🍑"? 

While you're waiting for the Unicode Consortium to approve the nine proposed new emoji, here's how to figure out what all 3,953 emoji mean.

Emojipedia is here to help

Emojipedia is an online encyclopedia of emoji managed by people who research emoji. The site sorts emoji into nine categories, including Smileys, People, Objects and Activity. Each category then breaks down emoji into further subsections. So, if you click into Smileys, for example, you'll see sections like Smiling & Affectionate and Sleepy & Unwell.

Emoji keyboard on iPhone

What's a text message without an emoji or two?

 Jason Cipriani/CNET

If you click an individual emoji, Emojipedia will give you a brief description of that emoji. For example, here's what Emojipedia writes about the  "✨" sparkles emoji: 

"Commonly used to indicate various positive sentiments, including love, happiness, beauty, gratitude, and excitement, as well as newness or cleanliness. 

May also be used as a form of ✨emphasis✨ or to convey sarcastic or mocking tones."

Emojipedia will also give you a list of other emoji that this particular emoji works well with. In the case of the "🎁" wrapped gift emoji, for example, Emojipedia's suggestions include the "🥳" partying face and the "🛒" shopping cart. 

Each Emojipedia entry also shows the artwork for each emoji across platforms, as well as how it evolved. The emoji entry will also show you short codes and other names for each emoji, if applicable.

What are the most popular emoji?

You may have your own go-to emoji, but according to Emojipedia, these are some of the most popular emoji as of the beginning of April. The list changes periodically, so what's popular now might not be popular next month or around a holiday. Note that not all platforms support all the latest emoji, so not all may appear on your device.

What are the latest emoji?

An orca, distorted face and other emoji coming out of a smartphone.
CNET/Apple

In 2025, the Unicode Consortium unveiled Unicode 17.0, which included eight new emoji listed here:

Apple included these emoji with iOS 26.4 in March, and Samsung One UI 8.5 brought these emoji to Android devices the same month. 

How often are new emoji added?

The proposed emoji for Unicode 18.0.
Emojipedia

Anyone can submit an idea for a new emoji. The Unicode Consortium is responsible for creating emoji. The group approves new emoji once a year, usually in the fall, but those emoji might not land on your device until the following spring.

A grid of nine new emoji that could be a part of Unicode 18.0.
Emojipedia

The Unicode Consortium proposed nine new emoji in October, including a pickle. A squinting face was also proposed at the time, but Unicode replaced it with a cracking face in January. Here's a full list of the proposed emoji. 

  • A cracking face.
  • A leftward thumb sign gesture.
  • A rightward thumb sign gesture.
  • A monarch butterfly.
  • A pickle.
  • A lighthouse.
  • A meteor.
  • An eraser.
  • A net with a handle.

The Unicode Consortium still needs to approve these emoji, but if they do, you could see them on your device in 2027.

What about custom emoji, like Apple's Genmoji?

Apple unveiled its emoji generator, Genmoji, at the Worldwide Developers Conference in 2024, and the tech giant included the feature in iOS 18.2. However, only people with an iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max or a device from the iPhone 16 lineup can access Genmoji for now.

If you can't use Genmoji and want to create your own custom emoji, Emojipedia is home to two custom emoji generators. 

An emoji of a pizza in the shape of a heart

You can create your own heart pizza emoji with an AI emoji generator.

 Emojipedia

First is Emojipedia's AI emoji generator. You can use this tool to create anything from a frog wearing a cowboy hat to a heart-shaped pizza. You type your description of the emoji into the generator, and the tool will create an emoji based on your description. You can then download or copy your custom emoji to your clipboard and use it as a sticker across messaging apps like WhatsApp and iMessage. This emoji generator is free, but you can only generate three emoji per day, so make sure you describe your emoji as much as possible so you don't waste one of your tries. 

If you run out of AI emoji generations for the day, you can also use the Emoji Mashup Bot, which combines two emoji from the Twemoji set. You can use this as many times as you want, but you can only choose up to 113 emoji to combine, and they are all smileys. That means you can't be as creative in your creation as you might be in the AI emoji generator. 

All this just for emoji?

Yeah, but wait, there's more! Emojipedia also hosts the World Emoji Awards on World Emoji Day, July 17. Awards are given for things like Most Popular New Emoji and Most Anticipated Emoji. Winners are determined by popular vote on X (formerly Twitter), and any emoji approved the year prior are eligible to win. 

A tired-looking emoji.

Behold, the most popular new emoji of 2025.

 Apple

The winner of Most Popular New Emoji in 2025 and the Most 2025 Emoji was the face with bags under the eyes. This emoji also won Most Anticipated Emoji for 2024, so the only award it has left to win is the Lifetime Achievement Award.

The distorted face emoji won for the Most Anticipated Emoji for 2025, and the melting face (🫠) emoji won the Lifetime Achievement Award. The melting face emoji is now the youngest emoji to receive that award, but face with bags under its eyes could dethrone it one day soon.

In 2024, the Most Popular New Emoji was the head shaking horizontally (🙂‍↔️). 

For more, here are the latest approved emoji, how to react to messages with emoji on your iPhone and how to use emoji instead of comments in Google Docs.