Each of the 50 U.S. states has a unique symbol: flag, animal, flower, and now, emoji.
SwiftKey this week revealed the United States of Emoji—an interactive map that highlights the most popular icons used across the country.
Based on the analysis of more than a billion emoji stored in the SwiftKey Cloud vaults, California—original home of Uber and Lyft—ranks high for the taxi emoji; its residents also use a lot of sushi, ramen, lemon, sunset, and bike images.
Hawaii is, as SwiftKey said, "[No. 1] for everything you would expect," including surfing, rainbows, waves, pineapples, and volcanos. The locals, however, surprised with their excessive use of the basketball figure.
Travel through the online map, and you'll find Floridians trumpeting, Montanans fishing, Coloradans reading, and Washington, D.C.-ites building snowmen. Other state specialties: eggplant (Nevada), ghost (Oklahoma), mustached man (South Dakota), koala (Connecticut), and gas pump (Illinois).
"As a company that specializes in learning from you to predict the best possible words—or emoji—we know a LOT about how people communicate," the SwiftKey team wrote in a blog post.
Some states suggest the types of conversation you'd expect: New Yorkers are represented by the Statue of Liberty, party popper, dancer, and flexed bicep. Others appear more random: Utah's lollipop, double exclamation marks, Cancer astrological sign, and alien.
SwiftKey in April published its first emoji report—an analysis of more than 1 billion symbol icons used by global speakers of 16 languages, which identified the 60 most popular types of emoji.
Happy faces made up 44.8 percent of international use, while sad faces landed at 14.33 percent. Hearts (12.5 percent), hand gestures (5.3 percent), and romance (2.4 percent) rounded out the top five. Surprisingly, none of these categories made it to the top of the U.S. lists.
Emoji have become as prolific as words and phrases when texting, emailing, and blogging. So it's no surprise that Unicode and Apple recently released sets of new (and diverse) characters for mobile and desktop users. SwiftKey took a similar step early this year, unleashing an iOS update with more than 800 different emoji.
Do you speak emoji? Take our quiz to find out.