Loudly Crying Face Emoji

The most confusing emoji on the internet. Officially, 😭 is a face sobbing uncontrollably. In practice, it's the #1 most-used emoji in the world and most of the time it means laughter, not sadness. Gen Z adopted it as their primary laughing emoji, replacing 😂 around 2020-2021. The logic: you're laughing so hard you're brought to tears. Or you're so overwhelmed by something cute, funny, or absurd that crying is the only appropriate response. The problem is that it still also means actual crying. "My cat did the funniest thing 😭" and "my cat passed away 😭" use the same emoji. Only context tells you which one it is, and that ambiguity has become a meme itself.

On X (Twitter), 😭 commands 25.4% of all emoji share, beating even 🔥. It hit 761 million mentions across social media in 2024, then 814 million in 2025. It first overtook 😂 as Twitter's #1 emoji in March 2021, and the two have been swapping the top spot since. You'll find it in TikTok comments (laughing), Instagram DMs (overwhelmed), quote tweets (disbelief), and text messages (could be anything). K-pop fan Twitter is one of the heaviest users.

😭 on its own isn't flirty. But if someone is 😭-ing at everything you say, they're trying to tell you you're funny. Being funny is attractive. So while the emoji itself isn't romantic, the pattern of using it heavily in your DMs can be a sign of interest. Compare it to someone who laughs at all your jokes in person.

• •😭 after something you said that was only mildly funny? They like you.
• •😭 in response to a selfie you posted? That's "you're so cute I'm crying," which is very much flirty.
• •😭 in a group chat? Just banter, not directed at you specifically.
• •😭 followed by "stop" or "I can't with you"? They enjoy your energy. Good sign.

😭 was part of the original Unicode 6.0 emoji batch in 2010, derived from Japanese carrier emoji sets where crying faces were already a staple. The design shows a face with its mouth open in a wail and two thick streams of tears. The character was proposed for encoding in L2/09-026, the joint Google/Apple submission that mapped 674 carrier glyphs into Unicode. The authors were Markus Scherer, Mark Davis, Kat Momoi, and Darick Tong from Google with Yasuo Kida and Peter Edberg from Apple, working off an earlier draft, L2/07-257, from 2007. The loud-crying-face glyph itself was already in circulation on Japanese phones before that: Softbank shipped it in 2000, NTT DoCoMo in 2001, and KDDI au added a version in 2005. For the first decade after Unicode 6.0, most people used 😭 the way it looks, to express sadness. The shift to a laughter emoji happened gradually on Black Twitter and in K-pop fan communities around 2019-2020, where 😭 became shorthand for "I'm crying laughing." By 2021, it had overtaken 😂 as Twitter's most-used emoji for the first time. Emojipedia's analysis of 385 million tweets confirmed it, and the two emojis have been trading the #1 spot ever since.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F62DU+1F62D LOUDLY CRYING FACE. Part of the Emoticons block. Added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015. Sourced from Japanese carrier emoji sets.

1. 2000Softbank includes a loud-crying face in its carrier emoji set, the earliest Japanese mobile predecessor of 😭
2. 2001NTT DoCoMo adds its own loud-crying-face glyph
3. 2005KDDI au ships a wailing-face emoji; all three carrier versions will later map to U+1F62D
4. 2009Unicode proposal L2/09-026 (Scherer, Davis, Momoi, Tong, Kida, Edberg) submits the Japanese carrier emoji set for encoding↗
5. 2010Unicode 6.0 standardizes 😭 as U+1F62D LOUDLY CRYING FACE↗
6. 2011Apple includes 😭 in iOS 5 emoji keyboard
7. 2015Emoji 1.0 formally classifies it
8. 2019Usage as a laughter emoji begins rising on Black Twitter and K-pop fan communities
9. 2021Overtakes 😂 as Twitter's #1 emoji for the first time (March 2021), ending 😂's nine-year reign↗
10. 2022😂 briefly reclaims #1 on Twitter (Feb 2022), but the margin is razor-thin↗
11. 2024#1 most-used emoji globally with 761M social media mentions (Meltwater)↗
12. 2025Maintains #1 position with 814M mentions. 25.4% share on X.↗

The laughter-vs-sadness split is primarily an English-speaking internet phenomenon driven by Twitter, TikTok, and K-pop fan culture. In Japan, where emoji originated, crying faces tend to be read more literally. In China, the emoji is used for sadness or being moved emotionally, less commonly for laughter. Research on emoji interpretation across East and West shows that East Asian users focus more on the eyes of emoji, while Western users focus on the mouth, which partly explains the divergent readings. Meltwater's 2025 country data reveals a geographic split: 😭 is the #1 emoji in South Africa, Indonesia, and the Philippines, but in the US, UK, Nigeria, Canada, and Ghana, 😂 still holds the top spot. Southeast Asia adopted 😭's laughter meaning faster than the West, partly through K-pop's outsized cultural influence in the region. India is an outlier entirely, where 🔥 leads both crying faces.

• •😭 was the #1 most-used emoji in 2024 with 761 million mentions, AND in 2025 with 814 million. Two years running at the top.
• •On X (Twitter), 😭 holds 25.4% of all emoji share of voice in 2025. One in four emojis on the platform is this face.
• •It first overtook 😂 on Twitter in March 2021, the first time any emoji had knocked 😂 off the top spot since emoji tracking began.
• •Linguistic researchers have published papers specifically about the semantic shift of 😭 from sadness to laughter, calling it one of the fastest meaning changes in digital communication.
• •The "Son 😭😭😭😭😭" meme uses exactly five 😭 emojis, and that specific count has become a format.
• •74% of all 😭 usage comes from 18-24 year olds. No other top-10 emoji skews this hard toward a single age group.
• •😂 held the #1 spot on Twitter for nine consecutive years (March 2012 to March 2021) before 😭 dethroned it. That's the longest unbroken reign in emoji history.
• •Of 😭's 814 million mentions in 2025, roughly 452 million came from female users. Emotionally expressive emojis skew female; humor and action emojis like 🔥 (64% male) and 😂 (62% male) skew the other way.
• •COVID accelerated the rise of 😭. Emojipedia tracked a surge between March and April 2020, when lockdowns hit, and usage never came back down.
• •The Unicode proposal that added 😭 was L2/09-026, authored by Markus Scherer, Mark Davis, Kat Momoi, and Darick Tong (Google) with Yasuo Kida and Peter Edberg (Apple). It covered 674 carrier glyphs in a single sweep.
• •Softbank had a loud-crying-face glyph as early as 2000, a full decade before Unicode 6.0. DoCoMo (2001) and KDDI au (2005) followed, and all three carrier versions were later unified into U+1F62D per the Emojiall U+1F62D carrier page.
• •The Unicode emoji catalog has roughly quadrupled since 😭 debuted. Emoji 16.0 (Sept 2024) hit 3,790 RGI codepoints, and Emoji 17.0 (Sept 2025) pushed it to 3,953. 😭 still pulled 25.4% of all X emoji volume in that bloated menu.

• •The biggest one: older generations reading 😭 as genuine sadness when Gen Z means it as laughter. This creates real miscommunication in workplaces and cross-generational group chats.
• •Using 😭 to react to genuinely tragic news when you meant to express sympathy can look like you're laughing at someone's loss. When in doubt about the audience, use words.
• •Some people use 😭 for mild frustration ("they're out of oat milk again 😭") which reads as dramatically overblown to people who reserve it for extreme emotions.

• •The "I noticed that you used 😭 in your comment" copypasta became one of the most recognizable TikTok memes of 2024, with millions of comments using the format to mock overuse of 😭.
• •The "Son 😭😭😭😭😭" meme format became a staple reaction image, conveying laughing-crying at something someone did. The five 😭 in a row became its own visual signature.
• •"I'm crine", AAVE slang originating from 2013 Bronx Twitter, went mainstream on TikTok in 2025 as the verbal equivalent of 😭.
• •😭 replaced 😂 as Gen Z's go-to laughter emoji around 2021. CNN, Today, and Vice all covered the shift. Linguist Gretchen McCulloch: "If you indicate digital laughter for years in the same way, it starts to feel insincere."
• •😭 is the most-used emoji on Twitter/X according to Meltwater's 2025 analysis, overtaking 😂 around 2022-2023. Its dual meaning (genuine crying AND laughing-so-hard-I'm-crying) gives it twice the use cases.
• •In K-pop fandom, 😭 is the standard reaction to everything: comeback teasers, concert clips, member interactions. ARMY (BTS), Blinks (BLACKPINK), and ONCE (TWICE) flood quote tweets with 😭, driving its global usage spikes during every comeback season.

• •U+1F62DU+1F62D. Single codepoint, no variation selector needed.
• •If you're building sentiment analysis, 😭 is one of the hardest emojis to classify. Without surrounding text context, it's genuinely ambiguous between positive and negative sentiment. Don't assume sadness.
• •On X's API, 😭 is the single most common emoji in tweet data. If you're sampling tweets, you'll encounter it constantly. Weight accordingly.

See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.