Face With Tears Of Joy Emoji
U+1F602:joy:About Face With Tears Of Joy 😂
Face With Tears Of Joy () is part of the Smileys & Emotion group in Unicode. Added in Unicode E0.6. Type on GitHub and Slack to use it. On TikTok, type in comments to insert it. Click copy above to grab it, paste it anywhere.
Works in iMessage, WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, Instagram, Twitter, Gmail, and every app that supports Unicode.
Often associated with crying, face, feels, and 12 more keywords.
Meaning varies across cultures, see cultural notes below.
Scroll down for the full story: meaning, trends, combos, and more.
How it looks
What does it mean?
The crying-laughing face is the internet's shorthand for "that's hilarious." You're laughing so hard you're tearing up. For most of the 2010s, it was the undisputed king of emoji. Oxford named it Word of the Year in 2015 after SwiftKey data showed it made up 20% of all emoji used in the UK. Keith Houston's 2025 book literally titled it "Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji," arguing that this one glyph carries "a richness of emoji usage that rivals any language." Then around 2021, Gen Z declared it dead, swapping it out for 💀 and 😭 as their laughter emojis of choice. The backlash was loud enough to generate actual news coverage. Now it's clawing its way back. Turns out people got tired of pretending 💀 was the only acceptable way to laugh. Cumulatively 😂 has been tweeted over 4 billion times and remains the most-used emoji in 75 countries. It was still the second most-used emoji globally in 2024 even during its "uncool" era, which tells you the reports of its death were greatly exaggerated.
The linguist Gretchen McCulloch argues in Because Internet that emojis aren't pictograms, they're digital gestures. 😂 is the internet's version of slapping your knee. That frame explains why it survives every cultural takedown: you can retire a word, you can't retire a gesture. You can only pretend you're not doing it.
You'll find it after jokes, memes, roasts, and self-deprecating stories. It softens teasing ("you really said that 😂"), signals you're not being serious, and fills the gap where "lol" used to live. On Facebook and WhatsApp it still reigns. On TikTok, it's the emoji equivalent of wearing New Balance at a house party.
It means something is so funny you're laughing until you cry. It's the digital equivalent of "I'm dying laughing" or an emphatic "LOL." The most widely used emoji in the world for over a decade.
Because 'lol' stopped meaning actual laughter years ago. People type 'lol' to fill silence or soften a message. 😂 still carries at least some implication that you actually found something funny. It's a step up from the dead-inside 'lol.'
The Four Laughter Emojis, Profiled
The Generational Map of Laughter
The World's Most-Used Emoji Is One of Its Least Positive
What it means from...
They think you're genuinely funny, or they're keeping things light and casual. If it shows up a lot, they're comfortable around you. If it's the only emoji they ever send, don't read too much into it.
Standard laughter reaction. Nothing to decode here. You told a joke, they laughed. The real worry is when the 😂 stops showing up entirely.
The default friend-texting reaction. Memes, inside jokes, screenshots of someone's unhinged group chat message. Nobody's reading into this one.
Safe pick for work. Professional enough that nobody flags it to HR, casual enough to prove you're not a robot. Probably the most diplomatically useful emoji in existence.
Flirty or friendly?
On its own, 😂 is almost always friendly. Too common to carry romantic weight. What matters is the pattern: if someone laughs at everything you say, even the stuff that really wasn't that funny, pay attention.
- •One 😂 after a genuinely funny message? Friendly. They just thought it was funny.
- •😂 on everything you say, funny or not? They probably like you.
- •😂 followed by 😍 or 🥰? Yeah, that's flirting.
- •😂😂😂 in rapid succession? They want you to know they're laughing, and they want you to feel good about it.
He thinks something is funny. Guys use 😂 pretty freely in casual conversation and it rarely carries romantic weight on its own. If he's sending it after everything you say, he might be trying to keep the conversation light and comfortable. But 😂 by itself isn't a flirting move.
Emoji combos
Origin story
The emoji traces back to Japanese cell phone carriers in the late 2000s. SoftBank Mobile and au by KDDI both had their own laughing-crying faces. When Google engineers Kat Momoi, Mark Davis, and Markus Scherer drafted the first Unicode emoji proposal in 2007, they pulled from these carrier sets. The official proposal landed in January 2009 with 625 emoji characters. Unicode accepted it in 2010, and 😂 shipped as part of Unicode 6.0. It didn't hit iPhones outside Japan until 2011, when Apple quietly enabled the emoji keyboard for everyone.
Working draft L2/07-257 (August 2007) first outlined encoding emoji from Japanese carrier sets. The formal proposal L2/09-026 (January 2009) included black-and-white sketches based on SoftBank's designs. Unicode 6.0 ratified it in October 2010.
Added in Unicode 6.0 (October 2010) as part of the first batch of standardized emoji. Codepoint U+1F602. Part of the Emoticons block. Sourced from SoftBank Mobile and au by KDDI carrier sets in Japan.
The Rise and Fall (and Rise?) of 😂's Usage Share
Design history
- 2008SoftBank Mobile and KDDI include laughing-crying faces in their proprietary emoji sets
- 2010Unicode 6.0 standardizes 😂 as U+1F602 FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY↗
- 2011Apple enables emoji keyboard globally on iOS 5, bringing 😂 to iPhones worldwide
- 2013Google adds 😂 to Android 4.4 with blob-style design
- 2015Oxford Dictionaries names 😂 the Word of the Year↗
- 2018Google redesigns from blobs to round faces, aligning with Apple's style
- 2021Gen Z declares 😂 uncool on TikTok. The discourse gets out of hand.
- 2025Irony fatigue kicks in. People start using 😂 unironically again.
Around the world
In Western countries, 😂 is pure laughter. No ambiguity. But the generational divide cuts across cultures: younger users in the US, UK, and Australia all shifted toward 💀 and 😭 around the same time. In countries where Facebook and WhatsApp dominate over TikTok, the emoji never fell out of favor. It's still the go-to in much of Latin America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. The "uncool" narrative was mainly an English-speaking, TikTok-native phenomenon.
It depends who you ask. Gen Z labeled it uncool around 2021, preferring 💀 and 😭 instead. But 😂 never actually stopped being popular. It was still the second most-used emoji globally in 2024. By 2025, it started coming back into favor as irony fatigue set in.
Musk has turned 😂 into his default dismissal. He famously replied with a single 😂 to a $128M lawsuit from fired Twitter executives in 2024. Kate Lindsay at Embedded argued this single-emoji-dunk pattern pulled 😂 into the right-wing insult toolkit, the same way ❤️ red hearts picked up political coding after 2024. Whether that shift stuck depends on who you follow.
Yes, routinely. Law professor Eric Goldman has catalogued over 1,017 US court cases involving emojis, with 😂 appearing in threat cases, defamation suits, and contract disputes. In State v. D.R.C., a 😂 preceding a violent message was cited by the court as evidence there was no genuine threat. The interpretation of a single laughing face can be the difference between protected speech and a criminal charge.
An April 2025 update to GPT-4o pushed the model toward a friendlier, more emoji-heavy tone. Users complained loudly about a "tsunami" of 🎉🚀🔥😂 in answers. OpenAI acknowledged they had over-indexed on short-term user feedback, training the model to be sycophantic. GPT-5 in August 2025 toned it back. For those six months, 😂 from an AI became the tell that you weren't getting a thoughtful answer.
The meaning is consistent everywhere: laughter. But the generational stigma is mostly a Western, English-speaking, TikTok-driven phenomenon. In Latin America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia where WhatsApp and Facebook dominate, 😂 never fell out of favor.
When 😂 becomes legal evidence
Usage trends
Currently ranked #2 in global emoji usage.
😂 didn't shrink. The emoji menu quadrupled.
Generational laughter, translated
Search interest
Often confused with
Gen Z uses 😭 to mean the same thing as 😂 (laughing hard). But the official meaning is "loudly crying." Context matters. If someone texts "my dog just died 😭" they are not laughing.
Gen Z uses 😭 to mean the same thing as 😂 (laughing hard). But the official meaning is "loudly crying." Context matters. If someone texts "my dog just died 😭" they are not laughing.
Rolling on the floor laughing. Technically more intense than 😂, but in practice they're nearly interchangeable. Some people perceive 🤣 as even more "boomer" than 😂.
Rolling on the floor laughing. Technically more intense than 😂, but in practice they're nearly interchangeable. Some people perceive 🤣 as even more "boomer" than 😂.
Grinning with sweat. This one isn't laughter. It's nervous, awkward, or relieved. "I almost missed my flight 😅" is very different from "I almost missed my flight 😂."
Grinning with sweat. This one isn't laughter. It's nervous, awkward, or relieved. "I almost missed my flight 😅" is very different from "I almost missed my flight 😂."
😂 is laughing with tears. 🤣 is rolling on the floor laughing, tilted sideways. In theory, 🤣 is more intense. In practice, they're used interchangeably. Some younger users consider 🤣 even more uncool than 😂.
They express the same thing ("that's hilarious") but signal different demographics. 😂 is the original. 💀 ("I'm dead") became the Gen Z alternative around 2020-2021. Both mean laughter, but using one over the other says something about your age or internet fluency.
Do's and don'ts
- ✓Use it to react to something genuinely funny
- ✓Pair it with text so the humor lands clearly
- ✓Use in casual settings: group chats, DMs, comment sections
- ✓Send it to soften light teasing between friends
- ✗Spam it under someone's serious post
- ✗Use it to mock someone who's upset
- ✗Send it in formal work emails (Slack is fine, the CEO email thread is not)
- ✗React to bad news with it, even if you're nervous-laughing
It can be, depending on context. "Sure, whatever you say 😂" reads very differently from "your dog just did the funniest thing 😂." The emoji itself is neutral. The surrounding message gives it tone.
One 😂 is a chuckle, an acknowledgment that something was funny. Two or three means you're really laughing. Five or more is either genuine hysteria or someone who doesn't know when to stop. The number correlates roughly with how funny they found it.
In Slack and Teams, yes. It's the safest laughter emoji for professional settings. It's warmer than typing 'haha' and less ambiguous than 💀 (which might confuse older colleagues). Don't use it in formal emails to external clients though.
Caption ideas
Aesthetic sets
Fun facts
- •In 2015, 😂 accounted for 20% of all emoji sent in the UK. One in five emoji was this exact face.
- •It's the benchmark emoji for Unicode's frequency rankings. Every other emoji's popularity is measured relative to 😂.
- •Twitter reported over 2 billion uses of 😂 in 2017 alone.
- •The original SoftBank design from 2008 was way more cartoonish, with a wider face and bigger tears.
- •Oxford's 2015 Word of the Year selection was the first (and so far only) time a pictograph won the award.
- •Despite Gen Z declaring it dead in 2021, 😂 was still the second most-used emoji globally in 2024, with 586 million mentions tracked across social platforms.
- •In the Emoji Sentiment Ranking study of 1.6M tweets, 😂 appeared 14,622 times, more than any other emoji. But only 46.8% of those tweets were positive. A quarter (24.7%) were negative. The world's favorite emoji is also one of its meanest: it's used for roasts, fails, and dark humor as much as for genuine joy.
- •Cumulatively on Twitter/X, 😂 has been tweeted more than 4 billion times. In early 2016 alone it had already crossed 14.5 billion lifetime appearances in the data Esquire reported, counting every appearance across tweets, replies, and retweets.
- •A 2024 peer-reviewed study on face emoji norms found 😂 had over 8.3 million occurrences in a German Twitter corpus and 2,433 instances in WhatsApp data, by far the most-used of 107 face emojis studied. Raters gave it just one dominant meaning: "funny / amusement." Consensus that strong is rare for any emoji.
- •Keith Houston's 2025 book "Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji" uses this single emoji as the jumping-off point for the entire history of emoji, from 1990s Japanese pagers to Unicode's expansion. The Wall Street Journal review called it "a lively exploration," praising Houston's claim that emoji has "a richness that rivals any language."
- •Santa Clara law professor Eric Goldman has logged over 1,017 US court cases that reference emojis or emoticons, 225 new ones in 2023 alone (a 17% jump year over year). 30% of US judicial opinions touching emoji come from 2018 onward. 😂 shows up in cases ranging from contract assent to threats, where whether the sender was laughing or mocking is now a question courts actually adjudicate.
- •In State v. D.R.C., a minor defendant's messages about killing her mother were preceded by 😂. The court treated the emoji as defeating the element of a genuine threat. The presence of a single laughing face was the difference between protected speech and a chargeable crime.
- •EmojiTracker, built by Matthew Rothenberg in 2013, was a public real-time ticker of emoji usage on Twitter. For nearly seven consecutive years, 😂 held the #1 spot on the leaderboard uninterrupted. Rothenberg open-sourced the code and eventually wrote about shutting it down in 2020 after Twitter's API rate limits made the counter unreliable. The monopoly 😂 held on that dashboard became its own small piece of internet history.
- •😂's share of the total emoji menu shrank from 20% in 2015 to ~7% in 2024, but the menu itself quadrupled: Emoji 1.0 (2015) had 1,282 approved characters; Emoji 16.0 (2024) holds nearly 3,800. Raw send volume has grown; the share just got diluted because there are now four times as many tiles to choose from. Most articles about 😂 "dying" don't mention the denominator.
Common misinterpretations
- •Some people read 😂 as passive-aggressive, especially in messages like "you never come visit 😂." The laughter feels dismissive rather than warm.
- •In heated online arguments, dropping a 😂 can come across as mocking or belittling the other person's point.
- •Younger users sometimes interpret 😂 from older senders as trying too hard or being out of touch, when the sender genuinely just found something funny.
In pop culture
- •Oxford named 😂 Word of the Year in 2015, the first time a pictograph won. It beat "Brexit" and "ad blocker." SwiftKey data showed it made up 20% of all emoji used in the UK that year. The announcement was covered by every major news outlet and sparked a genuine debate about whether an emoji could count as a word.
- •The Open Eye Crying Laughing Emoji became a meme in its own right starting in 2015 on Twitter. A distorted version with unnervingly wide-open eyes became shorthand for unhinged laughter. Deep-fried and warped versions spread through Discord and Reddit as a way to express chaotic humor that regular 😂 couldn't capture.
- •In The Emoji Movie (2017), the protagonist Gene lives in Textopolis, a city inside a phone. While Gene is a "meh" emoji, 😂 appears as a side character. The film was critically panned (it holds 6% on Rotten Tomatoes) but earned $217 million worldwide. It remains the only theatrically released film where emoji are literal characters.
- •SNL's Weekend Update featured a March 2026 sketch where Marcello Hernandez played the Heart Emoji and Mikey Day played the Aerial Tramway Emoji, discussing Apple's new emoji releases. The sketch played off the absurdity of emoji as cultural figures worthy of news coverage.
- •The YouTube channel Zdak built a following creating emoji design evolution videos, showing how 😂 and other faces changed across Apple, Google, and Samsung versions over the years. Their 😂 evolution video visualizes the design shifts that most people never notice.
How Musk reshaped 😂 in three years
- Oct 2022: Musk buys Twitter. Begins using 😂 as a reply to critics and news coverage.
- Mar 2024: Parag Agrawal and three other fired execs sue Musk for $128M in unpaid severance. [Musk's public response](https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/elon-musk-sued-fired-executives-severance-emoji-response-1235930392/) is a single 😂. No words.
- Mar 2025: Kate Lindsay's Embedded essay ["MAGA has ruined another emoji"](https://embedded.substack.com/p/elon-musk-crying-laughing-emoji) argues 😂 has become a right-wing dunk marker, mirroring how ❤️ polarized after the 2024 election.
- Ongoing: Critics now read a stray 😂 from a verified account on X as mockery by default, flipping the emoji's traditional warmth in that specific context.
Trivia
For developers
- •Codepoint U+1F602. Single code unit in UTF-32, surrogate pair in UTF-16 (0xD83D 0xDE02).
- •Don't hardcode emoji rendering. Different OS versions display different designs. Your tests might pass on macOS and look broken on Windows.
- •In regex, match with \u{1F602} using the unicode flag. For broader laughing-face matching, consider the Emoticons block range U+1F600-1F64F.
- •If you're counting emoji frequency in user-generated content, this one will dominate. Consider normalizing or weighting your results.
It was standardized in Unicode 6.0 in October 2010, based on Japanese cell phone emoji from SoftBank and KDDI. It became available on iPhones globally in 2011 and on Android in 2013.
See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.
How do you use 😂?
Select all that apply
- Face with Tears of Joy emoji (Wikipedia)
- Oxford Word of the Year 2015 (Oxford Languages)
- Emojipedia: Face with Tears of Joy (Emojipedia)
- Unicode Emoji Frequency (Unicode Consortium)
- How Gen Z Uses Emoji (Dictionary.com)
- 2025 Is the Year of the Crying-Laughing Emoji (Newsprint)
- Emoji Sentiment Ranking v1.0 (Novak et al.) (kt.ijs.si)
- Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji (Keith Houston) (W. W. Norton)
- Emojis Archives (Eric Goldman) (Technology & Marketing Law Blog)
- MAGA has ruined another emoji (Embedded / Kate Lindsay)
- Musk responds to $128M lawsuit with a crying-laughing emoji (Variety)
- Affective, semantic, frequency, and descriptive norms for 107 face emojis (PubMed Central)
- Emojis in Court (Samuels Law)
- Because Internet (Gretchen McCulloch) (gretchenmcculloch.com)
- Excessive Emoji Tsunami in ChatGPT (OpenAI Community)
- Most used emojis on Twitter (Statista)
- A Eulogy for EmojiTracker (Matthew Rothenberg) (Medium)
- EmojiTracker (archived) (emojitracker.com)
- Emojipedia Unicode emoji count stats (Emojipedia)
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