Do you speak modern emoji? (2025)

Thumbs up

Simple, self-explanatory, does what it says on the tin. Or does it? In 2022, a Reddit user created a media frenzy by describing the thumbs up emoji as “unsettling”. Turns out Gen Z finds the icon passive-aggressive or rude, much like ending your messages with a full stop. Don’t do that.

Slightly smiling face

If you thought thumbs up was bad, the innocent slightly smiling face fares no better, with interpretations ranging from dismissive to sarcastic. The youths agree a smiley face with pink cheeks is always best. Unless, of course, you want to be passive-aggressive.

Sparkles

A 2022 study by WordFinder found that the whimsical sparkles are one of the most frequently used emojis in Tinder bios, along with face with tears of joy, person shrugging, leaf fluttering in wind and black heart (red flag?).

Smiling facewith horns

Dating app research has also found that euphemistic emojis like smiling face with horns, eggplant and tongue are a major turn-off. Avoid. (Instagram went so far as toban the eggplant hashtag in 2015.)

Face with tears of joy

Face with tears of joy was named the Oxford Word of the Year for 2015. Used by everyone, all the time, it was fun, friendly and ultimately inoffensive. But nothing good lasts forever. Like many unsuspecting victims the icon was labelled painfully millennial (at best), while The Guardian called it “mocking and cruel”. Yet, in 2021, the Unicode Consortium – the non-profit in charge of emoji creation and encoding – released data on emoji usage and face with tears of joy triumphed over its critics, remaining the most frequently used emoji (by far), and accounting for 5 per cent of all emoji use. This one is fine.

Eyes

Gym bros have made flexed biceps the most popular body part, but the shifty eyes are much more powerful. Use them to “side-eye” suspicious behaviour or group-chat tensions. I was disappointed to learn they are also used as “pervy eyes”. Again, don’t do that.

Melting face

Melting face arrived alongside dotted line face as part of Unicode 14.0, which got a bit abstract. Itrepresents mortification, dread or bewildered positivity in the face of chaos. Very popular among frazzled editors.

Loudly crying face

Deliciously versatile, loudly crying face can be deployed in response to the hilarious, devastatingly cute or just plain devastating. It’s one of two variants favoured by Gen Z along with the skull (“I’m dead”), and has occasionally surpassed face with tears of joyin popularity.

Dotted line face
What is this? According to Emojipedia, it can represent “submissiveness, isolation, and depression”. Its proposer, Neil Cohn, drew on an established comic-book trope in which dotted lines signify invisibility. I’ve only seen dotted line face used for ghosts (of the dating variety).

Fire

Fire = hot. Or, if you’re slang-literate, fire = “fire” (great, amazing, cool). Simple.

Upside-down face

One of the least literal emojis is also one of the best, used to convey irony or a feeling of “smiling through the pain”. Jennifer Daniel, Unicode’s Emoji subcommittee chair, wrote of upside-down face: “My head may not spin around like ‘’, butit’s a vibe.”

Water pistol

Emoji-based communication has long been hampered by poor “vendor interoperability” – Android users might remember strings of boxes with question marks in. Most inconsistencies have been ironed out, although last year X redesigned the water pistol as an actual firearm.

Fairy
Have you heard of fairy comments? Gen Z has a habit of ironically surrounding vicious comments with lovable emojis like fairy, butterfly or sparkling heart. WikiHow provides a delightful alternative: “The fairy emoji is used to spread warmth and a little pixie dust.”

Sleepy face

This little face is not sad, but drastically misunderstood. Sleepy face’s tear is in fact a snot bubble – common iconography in manga to show that a character is sleeping. It is one of many emojis that reveal the pictograms’ origins in 1980s Japanese electronics.

Hearts

A classic. The rainbow of hearts can be arranged in flag colours or deployed as an extension of personal style (purple hearts go with purple eyeshadow). I’m told that in the early stages of dating all colours are fair game, except for red (way too intense). In the office, millennials are happy enough to send emojis to colleagues, but some draw the line at hearts, finding them overly familiar and unprofessional. We say spread the love.

Cowboy hat face

Various emojis made me feel like a stranger among my own generation. Apparently, Gen Z use this to portray awkwardness or smiling through pain (they have a lot of those). Pregnant woman can mean someone is so attractive their image impregnated you. Creative, if bizarre.

Blowfish

Unicode has rejected proposals for a cannabis emoji six times, but it seems people can do without it. So much so that the US Drug Enforcement Agency released a document decrypting “emoji drug code”, with a crystal ball for meth, and a puffer (or “blow”) fish for cocaine.

Check mark button

Check mark button is favoured by the LinkedIn crowd to punctuate insufferably long lists of achievements. Find it accompanied by the trophy, first-place medal, graduation cap, lightbulb, rocket, chart increasing, megaphone, brain… You get the idea.

Hand with index finger and thumb crossed

A decidedly new-gen alternative to the classic heart is the hand with index finger and thumb crossed. “Finger hearts” were popularised by South Korean celebrities in the 2010s. Teen K-pop fans use it to express love both online and IRL (in real life).

Lime

Lime was one of the newest emojis to land on iPhones as part of iOS 17.4. Since then, Unicode has approved a batch including harp and fingerprint, and is working on a trombone, orca whale and Big Foot-esque “hairy creature”. The random and obscure nature of these choices is due to Unicode’s selection criteria, which requires hundreds of millions of Google search results for an item as proof of concept. But who searches for emotions? As linguist Gretchen McCulloch points out in Wired, “Many of the most popular existing emojis” – ie, the see-no-evil monkey or anthropomorphic pile of poo – “would not have passed Unicode’s search criteria if they’d been in place at the time.”