Crying Face Emoji

A yellow face with raised eyebrows, a slight frown, and a single blue tear rolling down one cheek. 😢 expresses moderate sadness, disappointment, or emotional pain. It's quieter and more sincere than its dramatic cousin 😭, which has become so overused for humor and exaggeration that it's often read as sarcastic. Dictionary.com points out that 😢 is "favored over the loudly crying emoji to express sincere sympathies" precisely because 😭 gets misinterpreted as joking. That makes 😢 the go-to when you actually mean it. Adobe's 2022 Emoji Trend Report ranked it #5 among the most popular emojis in the US, behind 😂, 👍, ❤️, and 🤣. That's notable because the four emojis above it are all positive. 😢 is the highest-ranking sad emoji in America.

You'll see 😢 in texts about breakups, missed opportunities, and genuine bad news. It's the emoji people reach for when sharing condolences, expressing disappointment at canceled plans, or reacting to something bittersweet. Unlike 😭 — which Meltwater's 2025 data shows racked up 814 million social media mentions that year, largely because Gen Z repurposed it for laughter and overwhelm — 😢 has stayed close to its original meaning. That quiet consistency is its superpower. In group chats, a single 😢 after someone shares bad news feels empathetic without being performative. On Instagram stories, it appears in reaction stickers when someone shares something sad or vulnerable. On X/Twitter, where 😭 commands 25.4% share of voice as the platform's top emoji, 😢 barely registers in volume — but when it does show up, people read it as real. A University of Michigan study found that graduate students still lean on 😂 while undergrads overwhelmingly prefer 😭, with younger users seeing the older crying-laughing face as "cringe." 😢 sits outside this generational war entirely. It's the emoji that never got drafted into the irony machine.

The crying face has been part of emoji since the very beginning. Before Unicode standardized emoji in 2010, Japanese mobile carriers each had their own versions. SoftBank's 1997 set, the earliest known emoji set, already included crying faces among its 90 characters. DoCoMo's 1999 set by Shigetaka Kurita and KDDI's set had their own variations. When Unicode consolidated these carrier sets into a universal standard in 2010, the Crying Face became U+1F622U+1F622.

The single-tear design is specific and deliberate. It signals moderate sadness, not the theatrical open-mouth wailing of 😭 (U+1F62DU+1F62D). This distinction matters because 😭 has drifted from its original meaning. Emojipedia noted in 2021 that 😭 was overtaking 😂 as a reaction to humor, leaving 😢 as the more trustworthy indicator of actual sadness.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F622U+1F622 CRYING FACE. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. One of the original emoji set, with roots in the Japanese carrier emoji era. SoftBank, KDDI, and DoCoMo all had crying face variants in their pre-Unicode carrier emoji sets, making this one of the oldest emoji concepts. The cat variant 😿 (Crying Cat) exists as a separate emoji.

1. 1997SoftBank includes crying face variants in the first-ever mobile emoji set (90 emoji on the J-Phone SkyWalker DP-211SW)↗
2. 1999DoCoMo's Shigetaka Kurita creates 176 emoji including crying faces for i-mode
3. 2010Unicode 6.0 standardizes 😢 as U+1F622 CRYING FACE↗
4. 2015Added to Emoji 1.0, becoming available on iOS and Android
5. 2022Adobe Emoji Trend Report ranks 😢 #5 most popular emoji in the US↗

In Korea, the concept of crying in text predates emoji entirely. Korean texters use ㅠㅠ or ㅜㅜ to represent tears, since the hangul vowel characters ㅠ and ㅜ visually resemble falling teardrops. Repeating them (ㅠㅠㅠㅠ) intensifies the emotion, similar to sending 😢😢😢. T.T and TT_TT serve the same purpose in English and are still used in gaming communities. In Japanese kaomoji tradition, crying faces like (T⌓T) and (ಥ﹏ಥ) express sadness through the eyes, which aligns with research showing that Japanese culture reads emotion primarily from the eyes, while Western cultures focus on the mouth. This explains why the single tear on 😢 resonates strongly in East Asian contexts.

The generational divide is arguably a bigger cultural fault line than geography. Research published in the ASSA Journal found that Millennials tend to use emojis "according to their conventional or dictionary meanings," while Gen Z employs them for "much more complex and often ironic meanings." This split has left 😢 in an interesting position: because Gen Z repurposed 😭 for humor and exaggeration, they actually need 😢 more than any previous generation. It's the only crying emoji that still unambiguously means crying. A Euronews analysis of emoji usage in 2024 even classified 😭 among Europe's "most endangered" emojis in terms of original meaning, since its semantic drift has been so complete that some users no longer associate it with sadness at all.

• •😢 ranked #5 in Adobe's 2022 US Emoji Trend Report, making it the highest-ranking sad emoji in America. Every emoji above it expresses a positive emotion.
• •Korean texters have been typing tears since before emoji existed. The hangul characters ㅠㅠ and ㅜㅜ look like falling teardrops and serve the same purpose as 😢 in Korean digital culture. They're still widely used alongside emoji.
• •😢 has a cat variant: 😿 (Crying Cat), which is one of the original set of cat face emojis in Unicode.
• •Samsung's earlier emoji designs showed 😢 with tears welling in both eyes, closer to an anime style. Most platforms now use the standard single-tear design.
• •Dictionary.com notes that 😢 is preferred over 😭 for sincere sympathy because 😭 "is widely used in sarcastic, humorous ways and can be misinterpreted." When you actually mean it, one tear speaks louder than a flood.
• •In Meltwater's 2025 report, 😭 racked up 814 million social media mentions — the most of any emoji. 😢 doesn't even crack the top 20. But that gap is misleading: 😭 is popular because it stopped meaning "crying." 😢 is rare because it never stopped.
• •Researchers at Waseda University classified 😢 at 3.59 valence and 5.84 arousal on a 9-point scale, placing it in the "sad/depressed" emotional cluster. That's moderate negativity, moderate intensity — the emoji equivalent of quietly tearing up, not breaking down.

• •The single-tear emoji 😢 is distinct from the waterfall-crying 😭 in both intensity and cultural usage. In East Asian visual culture, a single tear (涙, namida) represents quiet, dignified sadness rather than dramatic wailing.
• •Korean text culture uses ㅠㅠ and ㅜㅜ as the text equivalent of 😢. These characters represent two streams of tears and are among the most commonly typed emoticons on Korean messaging platforms.
• •The "single tear" is a deep cinematic trope. From the Iron Eyes Cody PSA (1971) to Denzel Washington in Glory (1989), a lone tear rolling down a cheek conveys controlled, dignified grief. 😢 inherits that same visual grammar. It's not the ugly cry — it's the stoic one.
• •In Pixar's Inside Out (2015), Sadness is portrayed as essential and ultimately heroic — the emotion you need to feel before you can heal. 😢 fills the same role in the emoji keyboard. It's not the dramatic one (😭) or the brave one (🥲). It's the honest one.