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World Emoji Day: What Indians Feel About Different Emojis World Emoji Day is celebrated every year on July 17, and was started by Jeremy Burge, the founder of Emojipedia.

By Kabir Singh Bhandari

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Photo by Jacqueline Munguía on Unsplash

World Emoji Day is celebrated every year on July 17, and was started by Jeremy Burge, the founder of Emojipedia. According to The New York Times Burge created it "based on the way the calendar emoji is shown on iPhones. Essentially, users are to communicate using only emojis on this day, which seems to have become the norm for every other day in the current scenario.

For this year's World Emoji Day, Slack joined hands with their customer Duolingo to survey 9,400 hybrid workers in North America, Asia and Europe. The objective of the survey was to find out how each emoji is seen by different individuals. Those that stand for joy, laughter, sorrow, grief have become popular and signify a common meaning for all, emojis which depict money, some fruits and vegetables are looked at in different ways.

Given below are some quirky India insights from the world of emojis:

1. (Two eyes emoji) 46% of Indian respondents said the emoji means "I see you," while 27% think it means "I'm looking at this"

2. (Money coming in) This emoji is misinterpreted one with an almost even split of 41% who believed it means "influx of money" while 40% of Indian respondents used it to say "hoping for money" and interestingly 14% of the respondents used it to depict a "loss of money."

3. (One eye eink) Survey respondents seemed to have the most interpretations of this emoji with 44% of people using it to show "I'm kidding", 28% of people using it to show they are "feeling flirty" and 26% believing that it "refers to an inside joke."

4. If a colleague sends an eggplant emoji, hold off before immediately calling HR. 36% of Indian respondents said the eggplant is nothing more than a literal representation of the fruit. That said, 28% of Indians surveyed did say they use the eggplant to show they're "feeling flirty," and surprisingly a small but notable 16% use the emoji to convey that they are "feeling hungry.

5. Indian, Chinese and American workers are most likely to find emoji-less texts or messages lacking, especially compared with global respondents (85%, 74% and 71% respectively, versus 58% globally). This number is only likely to increase as digital-native generations grow older.

Kabir Singh Bhandari

Former Senior Assistant Editor

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