By Eivind Torgersen

“In many situations, an emoji seems more heartfelt than just plain text,” says Professor Patrick Georg Grosz.

The first emojis can be traced back to the late 1980s, but it was not until 2011 that they became a part of our everyday lives. That was when Apple, followed by other tech companies, implemented emojis in their operating systems.

As of the latest count in September 2024, there were around 3,800 emojis approved by the Unicode Consortium, the organization that standardizes digital fonts and characters.

“The vast majority of people use emojis, individuals of all genders and in all age groups,” says Professor Patrick Georg Grosz from the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Oslo.

Research on people's emoji use shows that faces and hearts are at the top of the list.

“It is the emotive emojis that we use the most. People use face emojis to bring the face back into written conversation,” says Grosz.

An emoji feels more heartfelt

Written text has become much more widespread over the last 20–30 years. Where we used to talk face to face, we now send texts or messages on WhatsApp and Messenger.

“In plain text, you lack facial expressions and hand gestures. Emojis are a way to bring this back,” says Grosz.

If you write “Can you call me?” you can add a smiling face or a sad face to imply whether you have something fun or something sad to tell.

Or you might insert a sad face after “Oh no. That’s too bad,” when responding to a friend who tells you they are sick and cannot come to the party you have planned.

“The sad face can communicate many different things. It can mean ‘I feel sorry for you,’ ‘I empathize with you,’ or that you think the entire situation is sad. You can write these things with words, but there is much evidence to suggest that it does not have the same effect,” says Grosz.

An emoji can express something we cannot say in other ways.

“There are indications that there are many situations where an emoji appears more heartfelt than plain text. Text can feel ‘colder’. We often see that this is how people intuitively interpret it,” says Grosz.

Age matters for emoji use

Even though emojis are now everywhere, most of us only have 14 years of experience with them. This means that age influences how you use them, what researchers call "emoji literacy" or "emoji competence."

“If you are 18 years old, you were 4 when emojis were launched, so you have grown up with emojis. If you are 40, you were already 26 when you encountered emojis for the first time,” says Grosz.

He and his colleagues see differences between age groups and different cultures. But the differences are not extreme.

“One difference that stands out is that age groups interpret emojis slightly differently in terms of how positive or negative they are. Older age groups tend to interpret emojis more literally. We also know that there are differences between men and women. But these are quite subtle differences,” says Grosz.

“There is also a lot of overlap between cultures. There are no substantial deviations in the interpretation of emojis depending on whether you are Norwegian, German, English, American, or Bulgarian. It is rare that a facial emoji means one thing in one country and something entirely different in another.”

Conventions and intuition

When an emoji is approved and included in Unicode, it gets a name, for example, “smiling face with smiling eyes” (😊). There is also a concept behind what it is supposed to mean, but there is no definitive answer to this question.

Some face emojis are intuitively understood based on their resemblance to human faces. Other times, we rely on knowing the background or conventions that give the emoji meaning. “Lying face” (🤥) and “zipper-mouth face” (🤐) are examples of the latter.

“We have learned that a long nose is connected to lying because of the story of Pinocchio. Similarly, whether you recognize the hand gesture where you close your mouth like a zipper depends on your cultural background,” says Grosz.

Neither people with such long noses nor with zipper mouths exist, and researchers often distinguish these from the more “realistic” face emojis. The former are considered more symbolic, while the latter rely on similarity to human faces.

“To some extent, emojis resemble faces. When you see an emoji for the first time, you often have an intuition about whether it is a positive emoji, a happy emoji – or a surprised emoji because it looks like a surprised face,” says Grosz.

Lower and upper teeth, or both?

However, it is not always easy to distinguish between the more realistic face emojis. The differences can be marginal. The website Emojipedia offers possible meanings and explanations, but there is no definitive answer.

For instance, what is the difference between “beaming face with smiling eyes” (😁) and “grinning face with smiling eyes” (😄)?

“They have the same eyes. Both have an open and smiling mouth, but one has visible lower and upper teeth, while the other only shows the upper teeth.”

“In a real human face, it is very difficult to make this distinction because you don’t control which teeth you show when you smile. If it is a picture of a face, it actually shows the same face,” says Grosz.

Together with colleagues in Germany, he has conducted a study (Cambridge University Press) to see how people perceive emojis that resemble each other in this way. It turns out that people assign different meanings to the two emojis and that they largely agree on this difference.

“People clearly assign different meanings to the two emojis. If both rows of teeth are shown, they associate it with joy or happiness. If only the upper row of teeth is visible, they associate it with laughter, enjoyment, or entertainment,” Grosz explains.

Emojis fulfill a need

In his research on emojis, the professor also finds it relevant that there are four different kissing faces: The traditional blowing a kiss face (😘), one with closed eyes (😚), one with open eyes (😗), and one with smiling eyes (😙).

“I don’t personally use all four, but we know there are people who do. The differences between the last three are very small; and easy to overlook. The question is what that difference means. This is something I look at in my research,” says Grosz.

Although emojis may seem trivial in our daily interactions with them, he believes it is important to take them seriously and examine them from a research perspective. They can tell us something about how humans communicate with each other, how we acquire skills, and how we use non-verbal elements when we talk with each other.

“We gesture all the time while we’re speaking. For the most part, our gestures – hand movements and facial expressions – are connected to what we say. They interact with language when we speak, but gestures are not language.”

Emojis seem to play a similar role when we send messages to each other.

“We can ask ourselves the same question regarding emojis. How do emojis interact with the text? What emojis do is very similar to what gestures do when we speak. They convey meaning on another level. Emojis, especially face emojis, are not language; they are not like words, but they interact with the words.”

“Emojis fulfill a communicative need in us humans. Researching emojis can teach us more about this,” says Grosz.