The most confusing emojis in every US state in 2024 | Hacker News Reader

The most confusing emojis in every US state in 2024

preply.com

36 pointsjerlam54 comments

> To find out the most confusing emojis in 2024, we at Preply took the top ten most confusing emojis from 2023 and surveyed respondents again about their meaning. We then used standard deviation to analyze answer choices to figure out which ones puzzle Americans the most.

… how do you stddev on multiple choice…?

But take the rank 2 emoji, "gust of wind"; I would say the top 3 choices are all pretty valid … depending on the context. The thing about emoji is that they're highly contextual. If I see "eggplant" on a grocery list, it might be just an eggplant. In other contexts … well. Similar with "persevering face"; I've probably used it for every option listed, depending on context. There's not always a 1:1 match between emoji & the exact thing you're trying to express. Words have that problem, too.

They list three emoji under "the most confusing new emoji" … they only surveyed those three. (The text is explicit about it, but the headline is clickbait.)

> … how do you stddev on multiple choice…?

By comparing the frequency of the least frequently chosen explanation to the most frequently? It is a bit weird without a more detailed actual explanation of methodology

> The thing about emoji is that they're highly contextual.

Same with the flying money emoji. It's on the list as confusing, but it lists "gaining money, losing money, and transferring money" as 85% of meanings. Context clears up which one of those it is

It clearly means "money is flying" but it leaves the direction of flight to context.

They're also sometimes culturally contextual. In China and quite possibly a lot of east Asia a smile emoji (https://emojipedia.org/slightly-smiling-face) very often means unhappiness-but-wish-to-avoid-a-confrontation and very often shows up in business contexts to pressure someone to do something. It is almost never used for genuine happiness.

It also surprises me that there is no good emoji for hugging. WeChat had to create a non-standard emoji for it and it is highly used. Especially when western culture far more normalizes platonic hugging, I would have expected 20 different hug emoji but they don't exist.

> It also surprises me that there is no good emoji for hugging.

… U+1FAC2 "People Hugging"?

> Especially when western culture far more normalizes platonic hugging

… I see U+1FAC2 used this way quite often in a forum I frequent…

Wonder why we can't have real "anatomical" emojis and have to resort to using eggplant like kids passing encoded messages?

Because while there are emoji conventions for user-specified colors, there are none for sizes.

I don't think most people would want to use anatomical emoji in the first place. though there's always 8=D

A well-written and well-sourced proposal might sway the Unicode Consortium. The 'powered on'/'powered off' characters come to mind as a successful recent attempt which did exactly that. Existing use of such 'text' (outside of Unicode) would make that bid a lot more likely to succeed though.

There's already dicks in Unicode: https://www.revk.uk/2018/10/unicode-dicks.html

Confusing the reader is exactly what I intend with that upside down smiley face

Well done, internet survey.

For newer emoji, if you want to know how it was originally supposed they might be used, you can look up the proposal to the Unicode Consortium for its inclusion.[1] Some of them are quite fun to read. Unfortunately Unicode's page is currently loading like I'm on 28k dial-up and you have to wait for it to get down to the one you want.

The old ones like "Nail Polish" were also proposed in large groups and don't have a special document just for themselves. But new ones do, for example:

"Dotted-line face": https://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetDocumentLink?L2/20-223

"Head shaking horizontally": https://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetDocumentLink?L2/23-034

"Phoenix": https://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetDocumentLink?L2/23-033

[1] https://www.unicode.org/emoji/charts/emoji-proposals.html

A huge percentage (most?) emojis are unhelpful precisely because their meanings are unclear. If they're from someone I've interacted with enough then I learn how to decipher what they mean by different ones, but if I've not then it's too risky to try and guess.

This aspect of emojis is why I dislike them.

They are helpful because they are unclear. There are cases where a bit of ambiguity is useful or you don't know exactly what to say. Face to face this can be solved with expressions, gestures etc. But in text form it's more difficult and emojis can help a bit.

> They are helpful because they are unclear.

Except their usage is often too unclear for the recipient. If that praying emoji after a request means they are praying for me to fullfil it? Or they just namaste me? Or they need that request fulfilled because they highly depend on it?

If someone tags my message with a clown emoji - does that message brought extreme joy to them or should I find them to talk face to face with them?

Some emoji are helpful by adding the non-verbal context. Some aren't.

> If someone tags my message with a clown emoji

Hey, there's another one that my social circle has settled on a clear meaning for. If any of my friends use it, what they mean is that they are admitting being foolish about something.

I thought the praying emoji is a stand-in for thanking someone.

Usually, but it does also get used in its literal sense, as “I’m praying for you” or even just “good luck.”

That's an interpretation that would never have occurred to me. Perhaps there's a cultural difference here? I don't see people in real life use that gesture to mean "thanks", so the thought wouldn't have crossed my mind in emoji form.

I'd take it as "I'm praying for you", which can be meant in both a positive and negative way.

It's how I've used it even on work Slack, the internet tells me folded hands means thanks or please in Japanese culture so perhaps that's the origin.

That's exactly what I'm talking about.

It's a clear import from the American culture here and while I can infer the meaning from the context, I doubt everyone would. Especially considering it's "Folded Hands" and not "Praying" and some sets have a... very strange picture for this emoji: https://emojipedia.org/google/android-5.0/folded-hands

PS holy shit, there is a WikiHow article on it's meaning and how to use it. While there is a lot of stuff on WH, the mere presense of that article adds to my position.

https://www.wikihow.com/What-Does-the-Praying-Hands-Emoji-Me...

https://www.wikihow.com/Category:Emoticons-and-Emojis

Emojis are nonverbal communication, much like any other. Just like it's best to be a little clinical or impersonal when meeting someone new (depending on context), it's best to be a bit reserved with emoji use. I use a very limited set in work chats, and a pretty wide set with my personal relationships. That's not a flaw of emojis, it's just how communication works.

Yes, I understand that completely. I wasn't saying emojis were flawed, I'm saying that I dislike them because they frequently cause misunderstandings. Sometimes serious misunderstandings.

I limit mine to the very basic ones that everyone understands. Smiley, Laughing, and Sad Face. I use the thumbs-up to quickly say "OK", too, but only with my friends.

> I use the thumbs-up to quickly say "OK", too, but only with my friends.

Depending on the age of your friends and the context, that could be causing misunderstandings too. "Thumbs-up emoji" can be read as a very passive-aggressive response outside of a work setting!

The important thing though is that words also cause confusion; emoji aren't uniquely ambiguous. Ideal communication is multi-modal; emoji are very often used to clarify the meaning of text.

> Depending on the age of your friends and the context, that could be causing misunderstandings too.

That's why I only use it with my friends. The meaning in my social circle is very clear because we all use it for exactly the same purpose.

Of course emojis aren't the only ambiguous communications. Words can be as well, although you can almost completely eliminate ambiguity with words. It's hard to do that with emojis.

> emoji are very often used to clarify the meaning of text.

My observations are that outside of the most basic emojis, they are more likely to confuse me than to clarify.

I really do, 100%, understand why people use emojis. Honest. I'm not saying they're bad and shouldn't be used.

I'm just saying that (outside of the basic ones) I find them to be misleading and confusing so much that I don't dare use them and gave up putting in the work trying to decipher ones when their meaning isn't immediately obvious to me.

No harm done. People can use emojis all they want, and when people use them with me, I certainly don't comment about it. I'm often not fully understanding their meaning, but that's actually fine. If it's something important, they're very likely to say it in other ways as well.

Fair enough, I only don't know if I agree with:

> although you can almost completely eliminate ambiguity with words

But maybe I'm just not skilled enough to do so :)

if you spit down, there’s a beard; if you spit up, there’s a mustache

there are definitely a few missing from the "not used as intended" list

also, are they really counting "rebirth" as an incorrect interpretation of the phoenix emoji? what is even the purpose of a phoenix emoji outside of that context.

and those head-shaking ones are just objectively terribly designed

To refer to the city in Arizona?

Should we expect the rise of the descriptivist emojians vs prescriptivist ones?

>> rebelled-against emojis, meaning the emojis that people use for different meanings than what their title suggests they mean. The top emoji people don’t use as intended is the persevering face, with only 5% using it as intended and the majority using it to signify frustration

I’m willing to bet money that less than 5% of the people using the Eggplant emoji actually mean eggplant.

Peach too

Unless they're in Georgia

Which is really a missed opportunity for U+130B8 EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH D052.

I had a candidate apply for a role and in his comms with our female recruiter sent a fairly ambiguous response and finished it up with the nail polish emoji.

That definitely ended his candidacy.

Not sure exactly what it meant, but couldn’t think of a good explanation for it.

Ending someone’s candidacy over an emoji you don’t understand seems premature at best. I know gay guys who use the nail polish emoji all the time at the end of their sentences, for example. Any chance this guy was gay and just being a bit casual with a recruiter he got along with?

I wouldn’t want to guess orientation from email or emoji usage.

That said, I hadn’t done the comms or calls, she had.

That’s also why I commented - emoji usage is very confusing in some instances. Our recruiter took it as a fairly chauvinist comment, but maybe it was meant a different way.

They were a marginal candidate, other comms weren’t great, this became one of the final factors.

Generally I think emoji usage in comms to a recruiter or hiring manager is risky, regardless of emoji chosen.

Emojis - the modern version of hieroglyphics

The issue with colorful emojis is that they are represented differently on different platforms.

If you want to control what emoji the receiver of your message actually sees, you have to use ascii emojis :-)

Oh, yes! I remember being shocked when I saw some text I had sent to a friends phone on his phone. A couple of the emojis looked very different from my phone's rendering, and it dramatically altered the meaning they had to me. If I had known they rendered that way on his, I wouldn't have used them.

That was the first inkling I got that emojis were risky.

If the common appearance of an emoji doesn't match its Unicode description, it can happen that we permanently "lose" certain emojis. For example, I once wondered why there is no "pouting face" emoji. There is one in the Unicode standard, but Apple decided to implement it as "red angry face" (even though there already was an angry face), and everyone followed suit. The end.

I think the usage of emojis is very comparable to reading an alethiometer, in that the symbols have many completely unrelated meanings, and the reader has to use their context and combination in order to understand the message. Also apparently only children can read them and understand them intuitively, whereas an adult has to build up an encyclopedic knowledge base to read on the same level.

Egyptian hieroglyphs did actually exist. They had ideological and phonetic uses, and they weren't fixed.

Always dreaded having to explain things like the thumbs up emoji or ship it squirrel to regulators, auditors, compliance and how that technically meets the change policy definition of “approved by senior technology leadership in writing on a ticket” if they put it on a release request or PR.

Because there are too many. We do not need like 8 different ultra specific types of drinks when one generic glass with liquid would suffice. Same for chicklet in half shell, front chicklet, side chicklet... Why? It defeats the purpose of generic communication.

I do wish there was a canned-drink emoji. There's 'CANNED FOOD' (U+1F96B) as of Unicode 10 but that doesn't fit the use case for me since drinks are typically consumed straight from the can.

A lot of emoji use is just slang. Just like regular word language. “that’s cool”, “that’s hot”—these can mean the same thing. Slang is also subcultural. :skull: won’t make sense to a 60+ year old man.

Another use is just to tack on to sentences like a little pizzaz. I’m going to the doctor :hospital:

Another common use is to soften formal-sounding written-only language. A lot of relatively older people don’t get or think about how their regular-ass sentence writing in informal contexts sounds stiff, angry, or even passive-aggressive to some younger people. Like writing a chat message with a period at the end? That can come off as very passive-aggressive. (See how even regular, grammatical, perfectly HN-approved (no emoticons) can have a tone even without any snark?) So if you have to write a sentence at the end? A smiley can soften that.

The ambiguity can also be intended. We all write for different people. We don’t intend to communicate perfectly. Some ambiguity is often good (in our opinion). One of the emoticons is interpreted by some as passive-aggressive, but far from all. That sounds like a great thing for a passive-aggressive person: plausible deniability.

People that dislike emojis and who also like to communicate clearly (perhaps to a fault) can take heart that some of the slang-energy is diverted into symbols. Now your regular-ass words are less likely to take on new, bewildering meanings.

I"m surprised this doesn't include prayer hands/high-five emoji.

I would like to see a breakdown of the 13% who think of 'DASH SYMBOL' (U+1F4A8) as smoking because in my (second-hand!!) experience it's mostly vape bros and bowl-rollers who use it that way.

What an idiotic article - we surveyed a bunch of people and because their answers didn't correspond exactly with the title an an emoji we concluded that they were, in some way, wrong/confused about it. Regardless of whether or not, in certain contexts, people actually use that very emoji to convey some of the 'wrong' sentiments.

This has the air of science research conducted by a 12 year old blogger and dressed up as content.

Facial expressions are confusing and ambiguous too. Maybe the emojis are WAI

Confusing? Or multipurpose?

I use an upside-down smiley face to mean that something is not what it is. Especially if something is opposite of what is being said. Get it, upside down - opposite of normal smiley... And the fact that it is smiling smiley softens the tone as opposed to being aggressive. How on earth does somebody manage to see passive aggressiveness in it...

https://xkcd.com/1845/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com