The way we use emojis evolves like language and changes their meaning

By Chris Stokel-Walker

The meaning of emojis changes depending on the context in which they’re used and when they’ve been posted, according to the first study of their use over time.

Alexander Robertson at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and his colleagues tracked how emojis were used between 2012 and 2018 by Twitter users. In all, 1.7 billion tweets were checked to see if they contained an emoji, with duplicate content and non-English tweets filtered out.

The tweets were then analysed with models that recognise the semantics of how words are used based …