This piece is part of a joint project by type.today journal and a website focused on various grammatical and broader language issues, gramota.ru. In our first episode, we addressed how emojis work from a technical perspective. For this one, we asked our colleagues from gramota.ru to tell us what emojis one should use with caution, both in design and everyday communication.

👍❤️👌☑️💩😭

According to a 2021 Perspectus Global survey of 2,000 people aged 16-29, the thumbs-up emoji (👍) ranked first among emojis that make you look old. It is then followed by the red heart (❤️), the OK hand (👌), the check emoji (☑️), the poo emoji (💩), the monkey with hands over face ( 🙈 ), and the clapping hands (👏).

The meanings of these symbols are intuitively clear. People coming of age in the 1980s are used to using them literally — a smiling face to express joy, a crying face to represent sadness. However, each new generation developed its own approach to digital communication. The millennial generation learned to combine several emojis to convey complicated feelings (for instance, a running man, a door, and a wind emoji could mean that a person feels like immediately leaving the chat or the place they’re in).

👍

In 2022, a Reddit user argued that the 👍 emoji should not be used at all — and his fellow commenters enthusiastically supported this post. Young people believe that the thumbs-up not only lost its relevance but is now also interpreted as a sign of passive aggression, hostile and ‘unsettling’.

Language differences between generations is nothing new. The uniqueness of this phenomenon when it comes to emojis is about how fast their semantics change and how global it all is. Unlike local slang expressions, emojis are used across the globe, giving the illusion of a universal language, which is, in fact, quite fragmented.

🪑

Today’s 20-year-olds have updated the ways to use emojis based on their own cultural reference points. They tend to redefine many emojis, giving them unexpected new meanings. In 2021, TikTok user @blank.antho posted two videos where he suggested using the chair emoji (🪑) instead of the laughing emoji. Eventually, this trend stopped being a joke and caught on among young active social media users.

74% of Gen Z use emojis in a way they were not initially used. Among other age groups, this share is lower: 65% of millennials, 48% of Gen Xers, and only 24% of boomers. Adobe 2022 U.S. Emoji Trend Report

🐸💀🍁

A team of researchers from the universities of Edinburgh, Essex, Utrecht, Oxford, Cambridge, and the Alan Turing Institute analysed 1.7 billion tweets posted between 2012 and 2018 and tracked semantic change in 348 emojis.

For example, the frog emoji (🐸) experienced a sudden but temporary addition of a new meaning in 2015. It came to be associated with a popular meme, Pepe the Frog, which, for its part, became an unofficial symbol of the American right. The trend reached its climax when Donald Trump posted an image of Pepe the Frog with his signature Trump hairdo as the US president. The skull emoji (💀) came to refer to death in a figurative sense (most often from embarrassment but also laughter). The meaning of the maple leaf emoji (🍁) changed depending on the time of year, ranging from illegal substances to the actual autumn.

🎁

Analysing messages on social media, linguist Tyler Schnoebelen found that the use of emojis varies the same way as dialects or slang of different social groups. The very same widely used emojis acquire new meanings and shades of meanings, which are not always clear to someone who is not a part of the group — that is, a representative of a different culture.

Interestingly, the existing practice of emoji usage depends on the country to a greater extent than it does on the language. So, the British mostly use the wrapped gift emoji (🎁) to denote specifically a Christmas gift or even Christmas itself, whereas the US citizens normally mean a gift in a broader sense.

👏👌✋

While in the Western world, the thumbs-up (👍) means approval or endorsement, it is perceived as an obscene gesture (pretty much the same goes for the OK emoji) in the Middle East. The clapping hands, or applause emoji (👏), might be understood as a reference to making love in China due to its resemblance to the ‘pah pah pah’ sound (啪啪啪啪).

Context doesn’t always help avoid confusion. For example, the raised hand emoji (✋) as a goodbye (especially after meeting someone for the first time) might be interpreted in different ways. In China, it often indicates one’s intention to end a relationship (especially when used in a chat), while in South Korea, waving with an open palm is used only to call a dog or a cat.

🌹😊❤️

Seemingly conventional symbols of love and affection can also be understood differently. For example, Arabic-speaking users often use the rose character as a sign of gratitude, respect, or even friendship (including in text messages exchanged by male users). When an American texts 😊, they most often mean to convey their friendly attitude or joy. When a Japanese user does the same, this might be an attempt to soften a potentially unpleasant message. In Western cultures, emojis are more often used to enhance the emotions already expressed through words, whereas in Eastern cultures, these characters are meant to convey emotions that are not normally expressed directly.

The red heart emoji ❤️ is way more popular in the Middle East than in the Western world, where people prefer using face-based emojis.

Westerners’ and Easterners’ ratings of the emotional valence (i.e., happiness/sadness) of emojis were influenced more heavily by the mouth and eyes, respectively. Boting Gao, Doug P. Vanderlaan Cultural Influences on Perceptions of Emotions Depicted in Emojis

🏩

Certain emojis are so tied to one particular country and its realities that their initial meaning is only known to its residents. For example, a house with a big letter H and a heart is often interpreted as a hospital or a wish to get well soon — almost anywhere except Japan. In fact, the official name of this emoji is Love Hotel (🏩), which refers to a specific type of Japanese hotel where people can rent a room to have sex.

🍚🐰☂️

In China, where social media debates about women’s rights as part of the #MeToo campaign were often blocked through government censorship, users have decided to replace the movement hashtag with bowl-of-rice and bunny emojis, since these words, written as 米兔, are pronounced as mi-tu in Chinese. It resulted in the bowl of rice 🍚 and the bunny face 🐰being used to draw attention to the issue of sexual violence. In Hong Kong during the 2019-2020 protests, the umbrella emoji (☂️) turned into a digital sign of solidarity, referring to the Umbrella Revolution of 2014.

🧀🍕

In 2020, more than 100 American online volunteers went on a real hunt, tracking down and reporting people using cheese and pizza emojis. This hunt was the result of a conspiracy theory that emerged back in 2016 in the United States during Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. At the time, her advisers and supporters from the Democratic Party were accused of being involved in a child abduction ring. The scandal became known as Pizzagate. Conspiracy theorists claimed that criminal elites were using a coded language, in which key words were replaced with innocent-sounding alternatives that started with the same letters. Specifically, the words ‘child pornography’ were allegedly replaced by ‘cheese pizza’. That’s how these emojis became a target.

🍆🍑

The emoji 🍆, which originally meant an aubergine, or an eggplant, soon acquired a clear erotic connotation, as did the emoji 🍑. The process of semantic transformation follows a clear logic here. First a visual association is triggered: an eggplant has a similar shape as a penis, while a peach looks like buttocks. Then users begin ironically experimenting with these associations. The emoji is gradually taking on a new meaning and becoming a commonly accepted code.

Only 7 % refer to the fruit. {when using the emoji 🍑} Hamdan Azhar Emojipedia

The main reason why such euphemisms are widespread is social media moderation algorithms that discourage creating any content directly related to the topics of sex and violence. But there are also less obvious explanations. Euphemistic emojis fulfil an important social function, helping bring up and address taboo topics. To teenagers, it is easier to exchange a couple of emojis than come up with some awkward phrases to describe their intention.

The platforms often embrace this interpretation of emojis and legitimise it through prompts: for instance, if you type in a word indicating a body part, it’s exactly the fruit emoji that pops up on Telegram for Android. At the same time, euphemistic meanings are rarely available in official Unicode descriptions.

---

When we communicate face to face, up to 65% of information is passed non-verbally — through our tone of voice, facial expressions, and hand gestures. Emojis have taken over that role in text messaging — with their help, we can smile, nod, frown, throw up our hands, or shrug our shoulders.

But research shows that most users have difficulty conveying complicated tenses, modality, and negation solely through emojis. For example, the phrase ‘I wouldn’t have gone there if I’d known’ cannot be accurately translated to the emoji language without substantial loss in meaning.

This is why we would advise using emojis with caution to avoid any possible confusion whenever you need to convey a clear message that does not leave room for different interpretations.