Crying Laughing Emoji

About

Crying Laughing Emoji, also known as Face With Tears of Joy, is an emoji used to convey the emotion of laughter to the point of tears. The emoji has become incredibly popular as an offhand expression, like LOL or LMAO, leading it to become the first emoji added to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Precursor

Before the creation of emoji, the emoticon XD was used in a similar fashion. XD is an emoticon of a smiley face guffawing with its mouth open and eyes closed, which is commonly used to convey loud laughter in a similar vein to the use of the acronym LOL. On some discussion forums and imageboard communities, the use of the emoticon, along with its phonetic transcription ecks dee, have been met with negative reception and even stigmatized as a form of “shitposting.”

Another emoticon used in a similar vein to the crying laughing emoji was :’-).^[8]

Origin

The Unicode Consortium, the international board that selects and approves new emoji from submissions, selected the Face with Tears of Joy for release in 2010 for version 6.0, released in Unicode standard.^[3] This emoji set was adopted as the first emoji available standard for Apple’s iOS and OS X. Like all emoji, the character was created from a suggestion sent in by a user.

Spread

Use of the Face with Tears of Joy has generally exploded since its inclusion in the emoji set. On Instagram, the emoji has ben used over 1,138,000 times.^[4] While it’s impossible to search for the emoji by use on Twitter, other sources, like the subreddit focused on Black Twitter,^[5] which allows for text searching, recorded thousands of uses. On November 16th, 2015, Oxford Dictionaries published an article where the emoji was picked to be the 2015 Word of the Year^[2]; by partnering with the data firm SwiftKey the dictionary’s board determined a series of usage statistics for the emoji in context. “SwiftKey identified that [Face with Tears of Joy] made up 20% of all the emojis used in the UK in 2015, and 17% of those in the US: a sharp rise from 4% and 9% respectively in 2014.”

In addition, Crying Laughing Emoji merchandise has become popular along with the use of the emoji.^[6]

Teen Rejected From Job With Emoji

On February 9th, 2017, Metro.uk^[7] reported that a teenager Megan Dixon was rejected from a job via a text that included the Crying Laughing emoji. In a screenshot given to the publication, the hiring directors for Miller and Carter gave Megan the rejection saying her answers were “basic” (shown below).