World Emoji Day is on July 17th. Emoji have become a major tool for communication in the last decade, along with GIFs and memes. How have emoji evolved in the past few years? According to the deputy emoji director of the online dictionary Emojipedia, emoji have been picked up and used to complement slang terms. For example, a few years ago, the skull face exploded in popularity during Halloween as a suggestion of a creepy skeleton. But now, in the form of emojis, they are expressed as 'Oh, I'm dying, I'm dying from laughing too much' or 'I'm dead. In other words, emojis, like any other language tool, is adopted to reflect the world around us. Thus, the skull is one of several emojis that are used beyond their literal definition. Typically, people and online communities create new meanings for emojis based on how they communicate in their world. Sometimes, however, these meanings and designs are directly changed by the tech companies themselves. For example, Apple's "pistol" emoji initially meant a handgun, but now it means a water pistol. In the wake of the shootings, most emoji vendors have changed their designs and no longer display realistic firearms. The same is true for this pandemic. To make people worry about vaccinations, vendors like Apple, Google, and Twitter actually removed the blood, the red liquid there, and the drops from their designs. Adobe surveyed 7,000 emoji users around the world. The results showed that the majority of people said that emojis are "important for uniting, respecting, and understanding each other." Think about that when you "raise your hand" to celebrate good news or give a "thumbs up" for an OK. So what is the most used emoji right now? The crying face. It no longer seems to be associated with genuine sadness at all, but as the skull emoji, it is increasingly being used in place of laughter.