Emoji and Emoticon Use in Online Dating Profiles and Chats: A Corpus Study into Functions and Categories

Abstract

Online dating has become mainstream in today’s society. Computer-mediated communication through online dating platforms is highly multimodal. An increasingly pervasive visual element of computer-mediated dating is emoji. This paper presents the first large-scale quantitative corpus analysis into the use of emoji and emoticons in dating profiles (n = 79) and dating chats (n = 125). All emoji and emoticons in the corpus were coded for their categories and functions. Findings reveal that emoji are used in significantly different ways in dating profiles as compared to dating chats. These results seem to correspond to the different purposes of these communicative contexts, namely self-presentation and impression management in profiles versus emotion expression and social connectedness in chats. Gender differences were also explored: men and women were found to differ in their use of emoji and emoticons in our online dating corpus, with women using more of such graphicons, especially for expressing emotions.