Emoji usage and age generations

For NYT’s the Upshot, Eve Washington, Larry Buchanan, and Claire Cain Miller examined the most commonly used emojis and how it changes by generation.

😭 reached the top by leapfrogging 🤣 and 😂 on the leaderboard. A big reason: Young people decided the other emojis were overused, according to linguists and a New York Times analysis of Reddit posts.

The new data comes from an anonymous sample of 665 million emojis used by people worldwide on Gboard, a Google keyboard built into most devices using Android, the most widely used operating system. Google shared the data with The Times, with 2025 being the latest available.

My emoji usage sadly reflects my age apparently. I mostly only use 👍 or 👎 with a sprinkle of 🙏. My emoting evolution kind of stopped at :).