😂 Face With Tears of Joy
what it means
Once the most-used emoji in the world and Oxford's 2015 Word of the Year. Gen Z largely abandoned it for 💀 and 😭, making it an unintentional age marker.
Laughter — and, to younger users, a signal that the sender is over about thirty.
the origin story
Added to Unicode in 2010; became the world's most-used emoji through the 2010s.
Oxford Dictionaries named it Word of the Year in 2015, the first time an emoji took the title. Around 2020, TikTok users began openly mocking it as a millennial habit, and its use among younger speakers collapsed — a rare case of an emoji becoming socially dated.
in the wild
My mum ends every message with 😂
Classic. We use 💀 now.
I'm using 😂 unironically and nobody can stop me.
Respect.
how to use it
- Perfectly fine in most everyday messaging
- With people who use it too
- Discussing emoji history
- If you're trying to sound like a teenager — 💀 is the current form
- In brand social copy aimed at Gen Z
- As the only reaction, where it reads as low effort
related terms
receipts
Community feedback
keep scrolling
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